Psychology, Second Edition
Copyright © 1986, 1989 by Worth Publishers, Inc.
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 88-50722
ISBN: 0-87901-400-8
4 5 - 93 92 91 90 89
Editors: Anne Vinnicombe and Deborah Posner
Production: Barbara Anne Seixas
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Illustration credits begin on page IC-1, and constitute an extension of the
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Preface
My goals in writing this book can be reduced to one overriding aim: to
merge rigorous science with a broad human perspective in a book that engages
both the mind and the heart. I wanted to set forth clearly the principles
and processes of psychology and at the same time to remain sensitive
to students' interests and to their futures as individuals. My aim was a
book that helps students to gain insight into the phenomena of their
everyday lives, to feel a sense of wonder about seemingly ordinary
human processes, and to see how psychology addresses deep intellec­
tual issues that cross disciplines. I also wanted to produce a book that
conveys to its readers the inquisitive, compassionate, and sometimes
playful spirit in which psychology can be approached. Believing with
Thoreau that "Anything living is easily and naturally expressed in pop­
ular language," I sought to communicate scholarship with crisp narra­
tive and vivid story telling.
To achieve these goals, I established, and have steadfastly tried to
follow, eight principles:
1. To exemplify the process of inquiry. The student is repeatedly
shown not just the outcome of research, but how the research
process works. Throughout, the book tries to excite the read­
er's curiosity. It invites readers to imagine themselves as par­
ticipants in classic experiments. Several chapters introduce re­
search stories as mysteries that are progressively unraveled as
one clue after another is put into place.
2. To teach critical thinking. By presenting research as intellectual
detective work, I have tried to exemplify an inquiring, analyti­
cal mind set. The reader will discover how an empirical ap­
proach can help evaluate competing ideas and claims for
highly publicized phenomena ranging from subliminal persua­
sion, ESP, and mother-infant bonding to astrology, basketball
streak shooting, and hypnotic age regression. And whether
they are studying memory, cognition, or statistics, students
learn principles of critical reasoning.
3. To put facts in the service of concepts. My intention has been not
to fill students' intellectual file drawers with facts but to reveal
psychology's major concepts. In each chapter I have placed the
greater emphasis on the concepts that students should carry
with them long after they have forgotten the details of what
they have read.
4. To be as up-to-date as possible. Few things dampen students'
interest as quickly as the sense that they are reading stale
news. While doing justice to the classic contributions of prior
years, I therefore sought to present the most important recent
xii
Preface
developments in the discipline. Accordingly, 73 percent of the
references in this edition are from the 1980s, and 47 percent of
these were published between 1986 and 1989.
5.
To integrate principles and applications. Throughout—by means
of anecdotes, case histories, and the posing of hypothetical
situations—I have tried to relate the findings of basic research
to their applications and implications. Where psychology can
illuminate pressing human issues—be they racism and sexism,
health and happiness, or violence and war—I have not hesi­
tated to shine its light.
6.
To enhance comprehension by providing continuity.
Many chap­
ters have a significant issue or theme that links the subtopics,
forming a thread through the chapter. The "Learning" chap­
ter, for example, conveys the idea that bold thinkers (Pavlov,
Skinner, Bandura) can serve as intellectual pioneers. The
"Thinking and Language" chapter raises the issue of human
rationality and irrationality. Other threads, such as the naturenurture issue, weave throughout the whole book.
7.
To reinforce learning at every step. Everyday examples and rhe­
torical questions encourage students to process the material
actively. Concepts are frequently applied and reinforced in
later chapters. Pedagogical aids in the margins augment learn­
ing without diluting or interrupting the text narrative. Each
chapter concludes with a narrative summary, a glossary of de­
fined key terms, and suggested readings that are attuned to
students' interests and abilities.
8.
To provide organizational flexibility. I have chosen an organiza­
tion in which developmental psychology is covered early be­
cause students usually find the material of particular interest
and because it introduces themes and concepts that are used
later in the text. Nevertheless, many instructors will have their
own preferred sequence. Thus the chapters were written to
anticipate other approaches to organizing the introductory
course. Statistics, for example, is covered in an appendix, thus
facilitating its being covered at any time.
S E C O N D EDITION FEATURES
This new edition retains the first edition's basic organization, format,
and voice. It is, however, thoroughly updated (more than 40 percent
of the references are new to this edition), painstakingly revised and
polished paragraph by paragraph, and there are dozens of fresh
examples. Without watering down the content, new learning aids
summarize or diagram difficult concepts. Research related to biopsychology, gender, and industrial/organizational psychology is inte­
grated throughout the text, with a cross-reference guide to these topics
at the ends of the chapters on biological foundations, gender, and
motivation.
There are numerous changes within chapters:
To increase the appeal of biological psychology, Chapter 2—formerly the longest and most arduous chapter—has been shortened
by moving material on evolution and behavior genetics to later chap­
ters. Without reducing overall coverage of biological foundations, this
reduces redundant coverage and enables students to get more quickly
to inherently interesting neuroscience research.
Chapter 3 treats infancy and childhood within a single section,
lending more coherence to its coverage of physical, cognitive, and so­
cial development. Chapter 4 similarly unifies the coverage of adult­
hood and aging. Now, for example, we explore changes in memory,
intelligence, and other traits across all of the adult years.
Chapter 5, Gender, is reorganized, and now emphasizes more
strongly the social construction of gender.
Among the major changes in other chapters you will find new
material on the biology of memory, on the biological and cognitive
underpinnings of depression, on teen sexual activity and pregnancy,
on the psychological effects of AIDS, on well-being across the life span,
on drugs and behavior, and on managerial motivation. Coverage of
obesity has been moved to the chapter on health, pain to the chapter
on sensation, and the ethics of animal research are now discussed in
the introductory chapter. The discussion of TV, pornography, and ag­
gression has been carefully revised and updated.
SUPPLEMENTS
Psychology is accompanied by a comprehensive and widely acclaimed
teaching and learning package. For students, there is a successful
study guide, Discovering Psychology, prepared by Richard Straub
(University of Michigan, Dearborn). Using the SQ3R (study, question,
read, recite, review) method, each chapter contains overviews, guided
study and review questions, and progress tests. In this new edition,
all answers to test questions are explained and page-referenced—
enabling students to know why each possible answer is right or wrong.
Discovering Psychology is available as a paperback and Diskcovering
Psychology is a microcomputer version for use on IBM PC, Macintosh,
or Apple II.
The masterfully improved computer software prepared by Thomas
Ludwig (Hope College) brings some of psychology's concepts and
methods to life. PsychSim II: Computer Simulations in Psychology
contains eleven revised programs and five new ones for use on the IBM
PC or true compatibles, Macintosh, and the Apple II family. Some
simulations engage the student as experimenter, by conditioning a rat
or electrically probing the hypothalamus. Others engage the student
as subject, as when responding to tests of memory or visual illusions.
Still others provide a dynamic tutorial/demonstration of, for example,
hemispheric processing or cognitive development principles. Student
worksheets are provided.
The Instructor's Resources, created by Martin Bolt (Calvin College),
have been acclaimed by users everywhere. The resources include ideas
for organizing the course, chapter objectives, lecture/discussion topics,
classroom exercises, student projects, film suggestions, and ready-touse handouts for student participation. The new resources package is
30 percent bigger, now includes approximately 140 transparencies, and
offers many new demonstration handouts.
The Test Bank, by John Brink (Calvin College), builds upon the
first edition Test Bank, which was written and edited by Brink with the
able assistance of Martin Bolt, Nancy Campbell-Goymer (BirminghamSouthern College), James Eison (Southeast Missouri State University),
and Anne Nowlin (Roane State Community College). The new edition
includes definitional/factual questions, more conceptual questions
than previous versions, and adds a new section of essay questions. All
questions are keyed to learning objectives and are page-referenced to
xiv
Preface
the textbook. The Test Bank questions are available on Computest, a
user-friendly computerized test-generation system for IBM PC, Macin­
tosh, and the Apple II family of microcomputers.
IN APPRECIATION
Aided by nearly 150 consultants and reviewers over the last six years,
this has become a far better, more accurate book than one author alone
(this author, at least) could have written. It gives me pleasure, there­
fore, to thank, and to exonerate from blame, the esteemed colleagues
who contributed criticisms, corrections, and creative ideas.
This new edition benefited from careful reviews at several stages.
Nearly a thousand students at seven colleges and universities critiqued
the first edition. Fourteen sensitive and knowledgeable teachers of­
fered their page-by-page critique of the first edition after using it in
class. This resulted in hundreds of small and large improvements, for
which I am indebted to:
Lisa J. Bishop, Indiana State
University
Laurie Braidwood, Indiana State
University
William Buskist, Auburn
University
Thomas H. Carr, Michigan State
University-East Lansing
Richard N. Ek, Corning
Community College
Roberta A. Eveslage, ]ohnson
County Community College
Larry Gregory, New Mexico State
University
Michael McCall, Monroe
Community College-Rochester
James A. Polyson, University of
Richmond
Donis Price, Mesa Community
College
Walter Swap, Tufts University
Linda L. Walsh, University of
Northern Iowa
Rita Wicks-Nelson, West Virginia
Institute of Technology
Mary Lou Zanich, Indiana
University of Pennsylvania
Additional reviewers critiqued individual first edition chapters
and/or successive second edition drafts. For their generous help and
countless good ideas, I thank:
David Barkmeier, Bunker Hill
Community College
John B. Best, Eastern Illinois
University
Martin Bolt, Calvin College
Richard Bowen, Loyola University
of Chicago
Kenneth S. Bowers, University of
Waterloo
David W. Brokaw, Azusa Pacific
University
Freda Rebelsky Camp,
Boston
University
Linda Camras, DcPaul University
Bernardo J. Carducci, Indiana
University Southeast-New Albany
Dennis Clare, College of San Mateo
Timothy DeVoogd, Cornell
University
Alice A. Eagly, Purdue University
Mary Frances Farkas, Lansing
Community College
Larry Gregory, New Mexico State
University
Richard A. Griggs, University of
Florida-Gainesville
Joseph H. Grosslight, Florida State
University-Tallahassee
Diane F. Halpern, California State
University-San Bernardino
Janet Shibley Hyde,
University of
Wisconsin-Madison
Mary Jasnoski, George Washington
University
Carl Merle Johnson,
Central
Michigan University
John Kounios, Tufts University
Robert M. Levy, Indiana State
University
T. C. Lewandowski, Delaware
County College
A. W. Logue, State University of
New York-Stony Brook
Nancy Maloney,
Vancouver
William Siegfried,
John Simpson,
Donald H. McBurney,
Shelly E. Taylor,
University
University of
North Carolina-Charlotte
Community College-hangar a Campus
Matthew Margres, Saginaw Valley
State University
University of
Washington-Seattle
University of
California-Los Angeles
of Pittsburgh
Donna Wood McCarty, Clayton
Ross A. Thompson,
State College
Mark McDaniel,
Nebraska-Lincoln
Purdue University
Elizabeth C. McDonel,
University
of Alabama-Tuscaloosa
Douglas Mook,
University of
Virginia
James A. Polyson,
University of
Janet J. Turnage,
University of
University of
Central Florida
Ko Vandonselaar, University of
Saskatchewan
Nancy J. Vye, Vanderbilt University
Mary Roth Walsh,
University of
Richmond
Oakley Ray, Vanderbilt University
Lowell
Duane M. Rumbaugh,
Florida
Rita Wicks-Nelson, West Virginia
Institute of Technology
Georgia
State University
Neil Salkind, University of Kansas
Nancy L. Segal,
Wilse B. Webb,
University of
University of
Minnesota
In preparing the first edition, consultants helped me reflect the
most current thinking in their specialties, and expert reviewers
critiqued the various chapter drafts. Because the result of their guid­
ance is carried forward into this new edition, I remain indebted to:
T. John Akamatsu, Kent State
University
Harry H. Avis, Sierra College
Richard B. Day,
University
McMaster
Edward L. Deci,
University of
Bernard J. Baars, The Wright
Rochester
Institute
John K. Bare, Carleton College
Timothy DeVoogd,
Jonathan Baron,
University of
Pennsylvania
Andrew Baum, Uniformed Services
University of the Health Sciences
Cornell
University
David Foulkes, Georgia Mental
Health Institute and Emory University
Larry H. Fujinaka,
Leeward
Community College
Kathleen Stassen Berger, Bronx
Robert J. Gatchel,
Community College, City University of
New York
Allen E. Bergin, Brigham Young
University
Texas Southwestern Medical CenterDallas
Mary Gauvain, Oregon State
University
George D. Bishop,
University of
Alan G. Glaros,
University of
University of
Texas-San Antonio
Missouri-Kansas City
Douglas W. Bloomquist,
Judith P. Goggin,
Framingham State College
Texas-El Paso
Kenneth S. Bowers,
Marvin R. Goldfried,
University of
State
University of New York-Stony Brook
Waterloo
Robert M. Boynton,
University of
California-San Diego
Ross Buck,
University of
University of
Connecticut
Timothy P. Carmody,
San
Francisco Veterans Administration
Medical Center
Stanley Coren, University of British
Columbia
Donald Cronkite, Hope College
Peter W. Culicover, The Ohio State
University
William T. Greenough,
University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Joseph H. Grosslight, Florida State
University-Tallahassee
James V. Hinrichs,
University of
Iowa
Douglas Hintzman,
University of
Oregon
Nils Hovik, Lehigh County
Community College
I. M. Hulicka, State University
College-Buffalo
xvi
Preface
Janet Shibley Hyde,
University of
Wisconsin-Madison
Carroll E. Izard,
University of
Delaware
John Jung, California State
University-Long Beach
John F. Kihlstrom,
University of
Arizona
Kathleen Kowal,
University of
Alexander J. Rosen,
University of
Illinois at Chicago Circle
Kay F. Schaffer, University of
Toledo
Alexander W. Siegel, University of
Houston
Ronald K. Siegel,
School of
Medicine at the University of
California-Los Angeles
North Carolina-Wilmington
Donald P. Spence,
Richard E. Mayer,
Medicine at Rutgers The State
University of New Jersey
University of
California-Santa Barbara
Donald H. McBurney,
University
Richard A. Steffy,
Vanderbilt
Waterloo
Leonard Stern, Eastern Washington
University
University
Robert J. Sternberg,
of Pittsburgh
Timothy P. McNamara,
University
Donald Meichenbaum,
School of
of Waterloo
University of
Yale
University
Donald H. Mershon,
North
Carolina State University
Carol A. Nowak,
Center for the
Study of Aging, State University of
New York-Buffalo
Anne Nowlin, Roane State
Community College
Jacob L. Orlofsky,
University of
Missouri-St. Louis
Willis F. Overton,
Temple
George C. Stone,
Richard D. Walk,
Florida
Joseph J. Palladino,
Merold Westphal,
University of
Ovide F. Pomerleau,
School of
Medicine at the University of MichiganAnn Arbor
Dennis R. Proffitt,
University of
Virginia
Judith Rodin, Yale University
George
Washington University
George Weaver, Florida State
University
University
Daniel J. Ozer, Boston University
Southern Indiana
Herbert L. Petri, Towson State
University
Robert Plutchik, Albert Einstein
College of Medicine
University of
California-San Francisco
Elliot Tanis, Hope College
Don Tucker, University of Oregon
Rhoda K. Unger, Montclair State
College
Wilse B. Webb,
University of
Fordham
University
David A. Wilder,
Rutgers The
State University of New Jersey
Joan Wilterdink,
University of
Wisconsin-Madison
Jeffrey J. Wine, Stanford University
Joseph Wolpe, The Medical College
of Pennsylvania, Eastern Pennsylvania
Psychiatric Institute
Gordon Wood, Michigan State
University
Fourteen individuals read the whole first edition manuscript and
provided me not only with a critique of each chapter but also with their
sense of the style and balance of the whole book. For their advice and
warm encouragement, I am grateful to:
John B. Best, Eastern Illinois
University
Martin Bolt, Calvin College
Cynthia J. Brandau, Belleville Area
College
Sharon S. Brehm,
University of
Kansas
Steven L. Buck,
University of
Washington
James Eison, Southeast Missouri
State University
Robert M. Levy, Indiana State
University
G. William Lucker,
University of
Texas-El Paso
Angela P. McGlynn,
Mercer
County Community College
Carol Myers, Holland, Michigan
Bobby J. Poe, Belleville Area
College
Catherine A. Riordan,
University
of Missouri-Rolla
Richard Straub,
University of
Michigan-Dearborn
Robert B. Wallace,
Hartford
University of
Preface
Through both editions, I have benefited from the meticulous cri­
tique, probing questions, and constant encouragement of Charles
Brewer (Furman University).
At Worth Publishers—a company whose entire staff is devoted to
the highest quality in everything they do—a host of people played key
supportive roles. Alison Meersschaert commissioned this book, envi­
sioned its goals and a process to fulfill them, and nurtured the book
nearly to the end of the draft first edition. I am also indebted to Manag­
ing Editor Anne Vinnicombe, leader of a dedicated editorial team, for
her prodigious effort in bringing both editions to fulfillment and metic­
ulously scrutinizing the accuracy, logical flow, and clarity of every
page. For this edition, developmental editor Barbara Brooks's careful
analysis and thoughtful suggestions improved every chapter. Debbie
Posner demonstrated exceptional commitment and competence in co­
ordinating the transformation of manuscript into book, as did Chris­
tine Brune, who supervised countless editorial details. Thanks also go
to Worth's production team, led by George Touloumes, for once again
crafting a final product that exceeds my expectations.
At Hope College, the supporting team members for this edition
included Julia Zuwerink, Wendy Braje, and Richard Burtt, who re­
searched, checked, and proofed countless items; Kathy Adamski, who
typed hundreds of dictated letters without ever losing her good cheer;
Phyllis and Richard Vandervelde, who processed thousands of pages
of various chapter drafts with their customary excellence; and my psy­
chology colleagues, Les Beach, Jane Dickie, Charles Green, Thomas
Ludwig, James Motiff, Patricia Roehling, John Shaughnessy, and Phil­
lip Van Eyl, whose knowledge and personal libraries I have tapped on
hundreds of occasions. The influence of my writing coach, poet-essay­
ist Jack Ridl, continues to be evident in the voice you will be hearing in
the pages that follow.
XVI
Contents in Brief
PART
1
PART
Foundations of Psychology
CHAPTER
CHAPTER
2
2
CHAPTER
24
CHAPTER
PART
3
CHAPTER
6
CHAPTER
5
88
16
CHAPTER
3
CHAPTER
474
18
Health
Experiencing the World
506
136
6
Sensation
PART
138
7
Social Behavior
CHAPTER
CHAPTER
19
168
Social Influence
8
CHAPTER
States of C o n s c i o u s n e s s
PART
192
4
254
610
G-1
REFERENCES
R-0
ILLUSTRATION
CREDITS
NAME
NI-0
INDEX
SUBJECT
INDEX
IC-1
SI—1
11
Thinking and L a n g u a g e
CHAPTER
574
Statistical Reasoning in Everyday Life
GLOSSARY
228
10
Memory
CHAPTER
20
Social Relations
226
9
Learning
CHAPTER
546
APPENDIX
Learning and Thinking
CHAPTER
544
7
Perception
CHAPTER
442
17
Therapy
CHAPTER
PART
408
Psychological Disorders
116
406
15
Personality
4
Gender
380
Personality, Disorder, and Weil-Being
54
56
Adolescence and Adulthood
CHAPTER
14
CHAPTER
The Developing Child
348
Emotion
2
Development over the Life Span
346
13
Motivation
Biological R o o t s of B e h a v i o r
PART
5
Motivation and Emotion
1
Introducing P s y c h o l o g y
CHAPTER
xxviii
282
12
Intelligence
314
xix
Contents
PART
2
Development over the Life Span
CHAPTER
3
The Developing Child
DEVELOPMENTAL
ISSUES 57
Genes or Experience? 58
Stages? 58
Continuity or
Stability or Change? 59
PRENATAL
DEVELOPMENT
NEWBORN
59
From Life Comes Life 59
AND
THE
The Competent
Newborn 61
INFANCY
AND
CHILDHOOD
Physical Development 62
Development 65
Box
62
Cognitive
Social Development 70
Father Care 73
REFLECTIONS
ON
ISSUE:
AND
GENES
Temperament 80
A
DEVELOPMENTAL
EXPERIENCE
Studies of Twins 81
80
xxii
Contents
Adoption Studies 83 How Much Credit (or
Blame) Do Parents Deserve? 84
Summing Up 85 Terms and Concepts to
Remember 86 For Further Reading 87
CHAPTER
4
Adolescence and Adulthood
ADOLESCENCE
Physical Development 90
Development 91
ADULTHOOD
AND
Development 102
ISSUES
Cognitive
Social Development 95
AGING
Physical Development 98
REFLECTIONS
88
89
98
Cognitive
Social Development 104
ON
DEVELOPMENTAL
111
Continuity and Stages 111
Change 112
Stability and
Summing Up 114 Terms and Concepts to
Remember 115 For Further Reading 115
CHAPTER
5
Gender
116
BIOLOGICAL
GENDER: IS
INFLUENCES ON
BIOLOGY DESTINY?
118
Hormones 118 Sociobiology: Doing What
Comes Naturally? 119
THE SOCIAL
GENDER
121
CONSTRUCTION
Theories of Gender-Typing 121
Roles 124
GENDER
OF
Gender
Nature-Nurture Interaction 128
DIFFERENCES
128
The Politics of Studying Gender
Differences 129
How Do Males and Females
Differ? 129
Summing Up 134 Terms and Concepts to
Remember 134 For Further Reading 135
The Developing Child
In mid-1978, the newest astonishment in medicine, covering all the front
pages, was the birth of an English baby nine months after conception in a
dish. The older surprise, which should still be fazing us all, is that a soli­
tary sperm and a single egg can fuse and become a human being under
any circumstance, and that, however implanted, [this multiplied] cell af­
fixed to the uterine wall will grow and differentiate into eight pounds of
baby; this has been going on under our eyes for so long a time that we've
gotten used to it; hence the outcries of amazement at this really minor
technical modification of the general procedure—nothing much, really,
beyond relocating the beginning of the process from the fallopian tube to a
plastic container.
Lewis Thomas,
The Medusa and Snail, 1979
The developing child is no less a wonder after birth than in the
womb. As we journey through life from womb to tomb, when and how
do we change?
As psychologists Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry Murray (1956)
noted, each person develops in certain respects like all other persons,
like some other persons, and like no other persons. Usually, our atten­
tion is drawn to the ways in which we are unique. But to developmen­
tal psychologists our commonalities are as important as our unique­
nesses. Virtually all of us—Michelangelo, Queen Elizabeth, Martin
Luther King, Jr., you, and I—began walking around age 1, talking by
age 2, and as children we engaged in social play in preparation for life's
serious work. We all smile and cry, love and hate, and occasionally
ponder the fact that someday we will die. As preparation for consider­
ing both the similarities and differences in our physical, cognitive, and
social development, let us first confront three overriding developmen­
tal issues.
DEVELOPMENTAL I S S U E S
Three major issues pervade developmental psychology:
1. How much is our development influenced by our genetic in­
heritance and how much by our experience?
2. Is development a gradual, continuous process, or does it pro­
ceed through a sequence of separate stages?
In male or female, y o u n g or old, d e v e l o p ­
ment Is a process of physical, mental, a n d
3. Do our individual traits persist or do we become different per­
sons as we age?
social g r o w t h that continues t h r o u g h o u t life.
57
58
PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
Let's briefly consider each of these issues and then return to them later
in this and the next chapter.
GENES OR EXPERIENCE?
Our genes are the biochemical units of heredity that make each of us a
distinctive human being. The genes we share are what make us people
rather than dogs or tulips. But might our individual genetic makeups
explain why one person is outgoing, another shy, or why one person is
slow-witted and another smart? Questions like these raise an issue of
profound importance: Are we influenced more by our genes or by our
life experience?
This nature-nurture (or genes-experience) debate has long been
one of psychology's chief concerns. Is behavior, like eye color, pretty
much fixed, or is it changeable? Our answer affects how we view cer­
tain social policies. Suppose that you presume people are the way they
are "by nature." You probably will not have much faith in programs
that try to rehabilitate prisoners or compensate for educational disad­
vantage. And you will probably agree with developmental psycholo­
gists who emphasize the influence of our genes. As a flower unfolds in
accord with its genetic blueprint, so our genes design an orderly se­
quence of biological growth processes called maturation. Maturation
decrees many of our commonalities: standing before walking, using
nouns before adjectives. Although extreme deprivation or abuse will
retard development, the genetic growth tendencies are inherent.
If you take the nurture side of the debate, you probably will agree
with the developmentalists who emphasize external influences. As a
potter shapes a lump of clay, our experiences are presumed to shape
us. This view was argued by the seventeenth-century philosopher
John Locke, who proposed that at birth the child in some ways is an
empty page on which experience writes its story. Although few today
wholeheartedly support Locke's proposition, research provides many
examples of nurture's effects.
In reality, nearly everyone agrees that our behaviors are a product
of the interaction of (1) our genes, (2) our past experience, and (3) the
present situation to which we are responding. Moreover, these factors
sometimes interact. For example, if an attractive, athletic teenage boy
has been treated as a leader and is now sought out by girls, shall we
say his positive self-image is due to his genes or his environment? It's
both, because his environment is reacting to his genetic endowment.
Asking which factor is more important is like asking whether the area
of a football field is due more to its length or to its width.
CONTINUITY
OR
More than 98 percent of our genes are
identical to those of c h i m p a n z e e s . Not
surprisingly, the physiological systems and
even the brain organizations of humans
a n d c h i m p a n z e e s are quite similar.
" M a t u r a t i o n (read the genetic p r o g r a m ,
largely) sets the course of development,
which is modified by experience, espe­
cially if that experience is deviant from
w h a t is normal for the s p e c i e s . "
Sandra Scarr (1982)
STAGES?
Everyone agrees that adults are vastly different from infants. But do
they differ as a giant redwood differs from its seedling—a difference
created by gradual, cumulative growth? Or do they differ as a butterfly
differs from a caterpillar—a difference of distinct stages?
Generally speaking, researchers who emphasize experience and
learning tend to see development as a slow, continuous shaping proc­
ess. Those who emphasize biological maturation tend to see develop­
ment as a sequence of genetically predetermined stages or steps. They
believe that, depending on an individual's heredity and experiences,
progress through the various stages may be quick or slow, but every­
one passes through the same stages in the same order.
Nature or nurture? Stability or c h a n g e ?
For e x a m p l e , h o w m u c h is this o u t g o i n g
b a b y ' s temperament due to her heredity
a n d h o w m u c h to her u p b r i n g i n g ? A n d
h o w likely is it that she will be an o u t g o ­
ing adult? T h e s e questions define t w o
fundamental issues of developmental psy­
chology.
C H A P T E R
3
T h e Developing Child
STABILITY O R C H A N C E ?
For most of this century, psychologists have taken the position that
once a person's personality is formed, it hardens and usually remains
set for life. Researchers who have followed lives through time are now
in the midst of a spirited debate over the extent to which our past
reaches into our future. Is development characterized more by stability
over time or by change? Are the effects of early experience enduring or
temporary? Will the cranky infant grow up to be an irritable adult, or is
such a child just as likely to become a placid, patient person? Do the
differences among classmates in, say, aggressiveness, aptitude, or
strivings for achievement persist throughout the life span? In short, to
what degree do we grow to be merely older versions of our early selves
and to what degree do we become new persons?
Most developmentalists today believe that for certain traits, such as
basic temperament, there is an underlying continuity, especially in the
years following early childhood. Yet, as we age we also change—
physically, cognitively, socially. Thus we have today's life-span view:
Human development is a lifelong process.
PRENATAL D E V E L O P M E N T AND
THE NEWBORN
FROM L I F E C O M E S L I F E
Nothing is more natural than a species reproducing itself. Yet nothing
is more wondrous. Consider human reproduction: The process starts
when a mature ovum (egg) is released by a woman's ovary and the
some 300 million sperm deposited during intercourse begin their race
upstream toward it. When a girl is born, she carries all the eggs she will
ever have, although only a few will ever mature and be released. A
boy, in contrast, begins producing sperm at puberty. The manufactur­
ing process continues 24 hours a day for the rest of his life, although
the rate of production—over 1000 sperm a second—does slow down
with age.
New life is created when egg and sperm unite, and the twentythree chromosomes carried in the egg are paired with the twenty-three
chromosomes brought to it by the sperm. These forty-six chromosomes
contain the master plan for your body (Figure 3 - 1 ) . Each chromosome
is composed of long threads of a molecule called DNA (deoxyribonu­
cleic acid). DNA in turn is made up of thousands of segments, called
genes, that are capable of synthesizing specific proteins (the biochemi­
cal building blocks of life).
Your sex is determined by the twenty-third pair of chromosomes,
the sex chromosomes. The member of the pair that came from your
mother was, invariably, an X chromosome. From your father, you had a
fifty-fifty chance of receiving an X chromosome, making you a female,
or a Y chromosome, making you a male. Biology has become so ad­
vanced that scientists have pinpointed the single tiny gene on the Y
chromosome that seems responsible for throwing the master switch
leading to the production of testosterone, and thus to maleness (Roberts,
1988).
Like space voyagers approaching a huge planet, the sperm ap­
proach a cell 85,000 times bigger than themselves. The relatively few
sperm that make it to the egg release digestive enzymes that eat away
(0
Figure 3 - 1
T h e g e n e s : their location
a n d composition. C o n t a i n e d i n the n u ­
cleus of each of the trillions of cells (a) in
your body are c h r o m o s o m e s (b). Each
c h r o m o s o m e is c o m p o s e d in part of the
molecule D N A (c). G e n e s , which are s e g ­
ments of D N A , form templates for the
production of proteins. By directing the
manufacture of proteins, the g e n e s deter­
mine our individual biological development.
59
60
PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
the egg's protective coating, allowing one sperm to penetrate (Figure
3 - 2 ) . As it does so, an electrical charge shoots across the ovum's sur­
face, blocking out other sperm during the minute or so that it takes the
egg to form a barrier. Meanwhile, fingerlike projections sprout around
the successful sperm and pull it inward. The egg nucleus and the
sperm nucleus move toward each other and, before half a day has
elapsed, they fuse. The two have become one.
But even at that moment, when one lucky sperm has won the 1 in
300 million lottery, an individual's destiny is not assured. Fewer than
half of fertilized eggs, called zygotes, survive beyond the first week
(Grobstein, 1979), and only a fourth survive to birth (Diamond, 1986).
If human life begins at conception, then most people die without being
born.
But for you and me good fortune prevailed. Beginning as one cell,
each of us became two cells, then four—each cell just like the first.
Then, within the first week, when this cell division had produced a
zygote of approximately 100 cells, the cells began to differentiate—to
specialize in structure and function. Within 2 weeks, the increasingly
diverse cells became attached to the mother's uterine wall, beginning
approximately 37 weeks of the closest human relationship (see Figure
3-3).
During the ensuing 6 weeks, the developing human is called an
embryo. In this embryonic period the organs begin to form and may
begin to function: The heart begins to beat and the liver begins to make
red blood cells. By the ninth week, the embryo has become unmistak­
ably human and is called a fetus. By the end of the sixth month, inter­
nal organs such as the stomach have become sufficiently formed and
functional that they allow a prematurely born fetus a chance of sur­
vival.
Nutrients and oxygen in the mother's blood pass through the pla­
centa into the blood of the fetus. If the mother is severely malnourished
during the last third of the pregnancy, when the demand for nutrients
reaches a peak, the baby may be born prematurely—or even be
stillborn.
(a)
Figure 3 - 3
Prenatal development.
(b)
Figure 3 - 2
D e v e l o p m e n t begins w h e n a
sperm unites with an e g g . T h e resulting
z y g o t e is a single cell that, if all g o e s well,
will become a 100-trillion-cell h u m a n
being.
Prenatal stages
Zygote:
Embryo:
Fetus:
conception to 2 weeks.
2 weeks through 8 weeks.
9 weeks to birth.
(d)
(c)
the body is n o w b i g g e r than the head,
fetus to the wall of the uterus and
(a) T h e e m b r y o g r o w s and develops rap­
and the arms and legs have g r o w n n o ­
t h r o u g h which the fetus is nourished, is
idly. At 40 d a y s , the spine is visible and
ticeably, (c) By the end of the second
clearly visible in this photo.) (d) As the
the arms and legs are b e g i n n i n g to g r o w .
month, w h e n the fetal period begins,
fetus enters the fourth m o n t h , it w e i g h s
(b) Five days later the e m b r y o ' s propor­
facial features, hands, and feet have
a b o u t 3 ounces.
tions have b e g u n to c h a n g e . T h e rest of
f orm ed. (The placenta, which attaches the
C H A P T E R
Along with nourishment, harmful substances, called teratogens,
can pass through or harm the placenta—with potentially tragic effects.
If the mother is a heroin addict, her baby is born a heroin addict. If she
is a heavy smoker, her newborn is likely to be underweight, sometimes
dangerously so (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
1983a). If she drinks much alcohol, her baby is at greater risk for birth
defects and mental retardation (Raymond, 1987). If she carries the
AIDS virus, her baby will often be infected as well (Minkoff, 1987).
3
T h e Developing Child
Tera literally means " m o n s t e r " ; teratogens
are " m o n s t e r - p r o d u c i n g " agents, such as
chemicals and viruses, that may harm the
fetus.
THE C O M P E T E N T N E W B O R N
Newborns come equipped with reflexes that are ideally suited for sur­
vival. The infants will withdraw a limb to escape pain; if a cloth is put
over their faces, interfering with their breathing, they will turn their
heads from side to side and swipe at it. New parents are often awed by
the coordinated sequence of reflexes by which babies obtain food. The
rooting reflex is one example: When their cheeks are touched, babies
will open their mouths and vigorously "root" for a nipple. Finding
one, they will automatically close on it and begin sucking—which itself
requires a coordinated sequence of tonguing, swallowing, and breath­
ing. Failing to find satisfaction, the hungry baby may cry—a behavior
that parents are predisposed to find highly unpleasant to hear and very
rewarding to relieve.
The pioneering American psychologist William James (who once
said, "The first lecture on psychology I ever heard was the first I ever
gave") presumed that the newborn experiences a "blooming, buzzing
confusion." Until the 1960s few people disagreed. It was said that,
apart from a blur of meaningless light and dark shades, newborns
could not see. Then, just as the development of new technology led to
a surge of progress in the neurosciences, so too did new investigative
techniques enhance the study of infants. Scientists discovered that
babies can tell you a lot—if you know how to ask. To ask, you must
capitalize on what the baby can do—gaze, suck, turn the head. So,
equipped with eye-tracking machines, pacifiers wired to electronic
gear, and other such devices, researchers set out to answer parents'
age-old question: What can my baby see, hear, smell, and think?
"It is a rare privilege to watch the birth,
g r o w t h , and first feeble struggles of a liv­
ing human m i n d . "
Annie Sullivan, in Helen Keller's
The Story of My Life,
1903
They discovered that a baby's sensory equipment is "wired" to
facilitate social responsiveness. Newborns turn their heads in the di­
rection of human voices, but not in response to artificial sounds. They
gaze more at a drawing of a human face than at a bull's-eye pattern; yet
they gaze more at a bull's-eye pattern—which has contrasts much like
that of the human eye—than at a solid disk (Fantz, 1961). They focus
best on objects about 9 inches away, which, wonder of wonders, just
happens to be the typical distance between a nursing infant's eyes and
the mother's. Newborns, it seems, arrive perfectly designed to see
their mothers' eyes first of all.
Babies' perceptual abilities are continuously developing during the
first months of life. Within days of birth, babies can distinguish their
mothers' facial expression, odor, and voice. A week-old nursing baby,
placed between a gauze pad from its mother's bra and one from an­
other nursing mother, will generally turn toward the smell of its own
mother's pad (MacFarlane, 1978). At 3 weeks of age, an infant who is
allowed to suck on a pacifier that sometimes turns on recordings of its
mother's voice and sometimes that of female stranger, will suck more
vigorously when it hears its mother's voice (Mills & Melhuish, 1974).
So not only can infants see what they need to see, and smell and hear
well, but they are already using their sensory equipment to learn.
Studies like the one under w a y in this
M I T lab are exploring infants' abilities to
perceive, think, a n d remember. This infant
is being tested on pattern perception.
Experiments have demonstrated that even
very y o u n g infants are capable of sophis­
ticated visual discrimination. T h e y often
s h o w a marked preference for one picture
over another, a n d will also look m u c h
longer at an unfamiliar pattern than at
one which they have seen before. S u c h
tests have c h a n g e d psychologists' ideas of
w h a t the world looks like to a baby.
62
PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
Two teams of investigators have reported the astonishing and con­
troversial finding that, in the second week—or even the first hour of
life—infants tend to imitate facial expressions (Field & others, 1982;
Meltzoff & Moore, 1983, 1985).
If such findings can be substantiated by additional research, it will
be a further tribute to the newborn's competence. Consider: How do
newborn babies relate their own facial movements to those of an adult?
And how can they coordinate the movements involved? The findings
are controversial because they contradict what most people have pre­
sumed to be the newborn's very limited sensory and motor abilities.
Researcher Tiffany Field (1987) notes that "Our knowledge of in­
fancy was in its infancy 20 years ago, but what we have learned since
then has dramatically changed the way we perceive and treat infants."
More and more, psychologists see the baby as "a very sophisticated
perceiver of the world, with very sensitive social and emotional quali­
ties and impressive intellectual abilities." The "helpless infant" of the
1950s has become the "amazing newborn" of the 1980s.
Imitation? W h e n A n d r e w Meltzoff s h o w s
his t o n g u e , an 1 8 - d a y - o l d boy responds
similarly. " A s our experimental techniques
have become more a n d more sophisti­
INFANCY AND C H I L D H O O D
During infancy, a baby grows from newborn to toddler, and during
childhood from toddler to teenager. Beginning in this chapter with
infancy and childhood and continuing in the next chapter with adoles­
cence through old age, we will see how people of all ages are continu­
ally developing—physically, cognitively, and socially.
PHYSICAL
c a t e d , " reports Meltzoff ( 1 9 8 7 ) , " t h e in­
fants themselves have appeared more a n d
more c l e v e r . "
DEVELOPMENT
Brain D e v e l o p m e n t While you resided in your mother's womb,
your body was forming nerve cells at the rate of about one-quarter
million per minute. On the day you were born you had essentially all
the brain cells you were ever going to have. However, the human
nervous system is immature at birth; the neural networks that enable
us to walk, talk, and remember are only beginning to form (see
Figure 3 - 4 ) .
Along with the development of neural networks we see increasing
myelinization of neurons. (As we saw in Chapter 2, myelin is a fatty
cell that encases the axon, enabling messages to speed many times
faster.) The nerve fibers that monitor and coordinate bladder control,
for example, are not fully myelinated until the second year. To expect a
toddler to do without a diaper before then is to court disaster.
The storage of permanent memory also requires neural develop­
ment. Our earliest memories go back only to between our third and
fourth birthdays (Kihlstrom & Harachkiewicz, 1982). For parents, this
"infantile amnesia," as Freud called it, can be disconcerting. After all
the hours we spend with our babies—after all the frolicking on the rug,
all the diapering, feeding, and rocking to sleep—what would they con­
sciously remember of us if we died? Nothing!
But if nothing is consciously recalled, something has still been
gained. From birth (and even before), infants can learn. They can learn
to turn their heads away to make an adult "peekaboo" at them, to pull
a string to make a mobile turn, to turn their heads to the left or right to
receive a sugar solution when their forehead is stroked (Blass, 1987;
Bower, 1977; Lancioni, 1980). Such learning tends not to persist unless
At birth
6 months
Figure 3 - 4
1 month
15 months
3 months
2 years
In h u m a n s , the brain is
immature at birth. T h e s e drawings of sec­
tions of brain tissue from the cerebral cor­
tex illustrate the increasing complexity of
the neural networks in the maturing
h u m a n brain.
C H A P T E R
reactivated. Nevertheless, early learning may prepare our brains for
those later experiences that we do remember. For example, children
who become deaf at age 2, after being exposed to speech, are later
more easily language trained than those deaf from birth (Lenneberg,
1967). It has been suggested that the first 2 years are therefore critical
for learning language.
Animals such as guinea pigs, whose brains are mature at birth,
more readily form permanent memories from infancy than do animals
with immature brains, such as rats (Campbell & Coulter, 1976). Be­
cause human brains are also immature at birth, these findings cast
doubt on the idea that people subconsciously remember their prenatal
life or the trauma of their birth. But, given occasional reminders,
3-month-old infants who learn that moving their leg propels a mobile
will indeed remember the association for at least a month (RoveeCollier, 1988)—so some infant memory does exist.
Does experience, as well as biological maturation, help develop the
brain's neural connections? Although "forgotten," early learning may
help prepare our brains for thought and language, and for later experi­
ences. Surely our early learning must somehow be recorded "in
there."
If early experiences affect us by leaving their "marks" in the brain,
then it should be possible to detect evidence of this. The modern tools
of neuroscience allow us a closer look. Working at the University of
California, Berkeley, Mark Rosenzweig caged some rats in solitary con­
finement, while others were caged in a communal playground (Figure
3-5). Rats living in the deprived environment usually developed a
lighter and thinner cortex with smaller nerve cell bodies, as well as
fewer glial cells (the "glue cells" that support and nourish the brain's
neurons). Rosenzweig (1984a; Renner & Rosenzweig, 1987) reported
being so surprised by these effects of experience on brain tissue that he
repeated the experiment several times before publishing his findings—
findings that have led to improvements in the environments provided
for laboratory and farm animals and for institutionalized children.
Other recent studies extended these findings. Several research
teams have found that infant rats and premature babies benefit from
the stimulation of being touched or massaged (Field & others, 1986;
Meaney & others, 1988). "Handled" infants of both species gain
weight more rapidly and develop faster neurologically. In adulthood,
handled rat pups also secrete less of a stress hormone that during
aging causes neuron death in the hippocampus, a brain center impor­
tant for memory. William Greenough and his University of Illinois co­
workers (1987) further discovered that repeated experiences sculpt a
rat's neural tissue—at the very spot in the brain where the experience
is processed. This sculpting seems to work by preserving activated
neural connections while allowing unused connections to degenerate.
3
T h e Developing Child
Impoverished
environment
Enriched
environment
Figure 3 - 5
Experience affects the
brain's development. In experiments pio­
neered by M a r k R o s e n z w e i g and D a v i d
K r e c h , rats were reared either alone in an
More and more, researchers are becoming convinced that the
brain's neural connections are dynamic; throughout life our neural tis­
sue is changing. Our genes dictate our overall brain architecture, but
experience directs the details. If a monkey is trained to push a lever
with a finger several thousand times a day, the brain tissue that con­
trols the finger changes to reflect the experience. The wiring of Michael
Jordan's brain reflects the thousands of hours he has spent shooting
baskets. Experience, it seems, helps nurture nature.
environment without playthings or with
Motor Development As the infant's muscles and neural networks
mature, ever more complicated skills emerge. Although the age at
M. C. D i a m o n d . C o p y r i g h t © 1 9 7 2 S c i e n ­
others in an environment enriched with
playthings that were c h a n g e d daily. In
fourteen out of sixteen repetitions of this
basic experiment, the rats placed in the
enriched environment developed signifi­
cantly more cerebral cortex relative to the
rest of the brain's tissue than those in the
impoverished environment. (From " B r a i n
c h a n g e s in response to e x p e r i e n c e " by
M. R. R o s e n z w e i g , E. L Bennett, and
tific A m e r i c a n , Inc. All rights reserved.)
63
which infants sit, stand, and walk varies from child to child, the se­
quence in which babies pass these developmental milestones (Figure
3 - 6 ) is universal.
Can experience retard or speed up the maturation of physical
skills? If babies were bound to a cradleboard for much of their first
year—the traditional practice among the Hopi Indians—would they
walk later than do unbound infants? If allowed to spend an hour a day
in a walker chair after age 4 months, would they walk earlier? Amaz­
ingly, in view of what we now know about the effects experience has
on the brain, the answer to both questions seems to be no (Dennis,
1940; Ridenour, 1982).
Biological maturation—including the rapid development of the
cerebellum at the rear of the brain—creates a readiness to learn walk­
ing at about 1 year of age. Experience before that time has no more
than a small effect, although restriction later may retard development
(Super, 1981). This is true for other physical skills, including bowel and
bladder control. Until the necessary muscular and neural maturation
has occurred, no amount of pleading, harassment, or punishment can
lead to successful toilet training.
After a spurt during the first 2 years, growth slows to a steady 2 to
3 inches per year through childhood. With all of the neurons and most
of their interconnections in place, brain development after age 2 simi­
larly proceeds at a slower pace. The sensory and motor cortex areas
continue to mature relatively rapidly, enabling fine motor skills to de­
velop further (R. Wilson, 1978). The association areas of the cortex—
those associated with thinking, memory, and language—are the last
brain areas to develop.
C H A P T E R
3
T h e Developing Child
COGNITIVE D E V E L O P M E N T
Brain scans and brain wave analyses reveal that the development of
different brain areas during infancy and childhood corresponds closely
with cognitive development (Chugani & Phelps, 1986; Thatcher & oth­
ers, 1987). Brain and mind develop together. Cognition refers to all the
mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, and remember­
ing. Few questions have intrigued developmental psychologists more
than these: When can children begin to remember? See things from
another's point of view? Reason logically? Think symbolically? Simply
put, how does a child's mind grow? Such were the questions posed by
developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (pronounced Pea-ah-ZHAY).
"Who knows the thoughts of a child?" wondered poet Nora Perry.
As much as anyone of his generation, Piaget knew. His interest in
children's cognitive processes began in 1920, when he was working in
Paris to develop questions for children's intelligence tests. In the
course of administering tests to find out at what age children could
answer certain questions correctly, Piaget became intrigued by
children's wrong answers. Where others saw childish mistakes, Piaget
saw intelligence at work. He observed that the errors made by children
of a given age were often strikingly similar.
The more than 50 years Piaget spent in such informal activities
with children convinced him that the child's mind is not a miniature model
of the adult''s: Young children actively construct their understandings of
the world in radically different ways than adults do, a fact that we
overlook when attempting to teach children by using our adult logic.
Piaget further believed that the child's mind develops through a series
of stages, in an upward march from the sensorimotor simplicity of the
newborn to the abstract reasoning power of the adult. An 8-year-old
child therefore comprehends things that a 3-year-old cannot. An
8-year-old might grasp the analogy "getting an idea is like having a
light turn on in your head," but trying to teach the same analogy to a
3-year-old would be fruitless.
Jean Piaget ( 1 9 3 0 , p. 2 3 7 ) : " I f we e x a m ­
ine the intellectual d e v e l o p m e n t of the
individual or of the whole of humanity,
we shall find that the h u m a n spirit g o e s
t h r o u g h a certain n u m b e r of stages, each
different from the o t h e r . "
" F o r everything there is a season, and a
time for every matter under h e a v e n . "
How the Mind of a Child Grows The driving force behind this
intellectual progression is the unceasing struggle to make sense out of
one's world. To this end, the maturing brain builds concepts, which
Piaget called schemas. Schemas are ways of looking at the world that
organize our past experiences and provide a framework for under­
standing our future experiences. We start life with simple schemas—
those involving sense-driven reflexes such as sucking and grasping. By
adulthood we have built a seemingly limitless number of schemas that
range from knowing how to tie a knot to knowing what it means to be
in love.
Piaget proposed two concepts to explain how we use and adjust
our schemas. First, we interpret our experience in terms of our current
understandings; in Piaget's terms, we incorporate, or assimilate, new
experiences into our existing schemas.
Assimilation is interpreting new experiences in light of one's sche­
mas, as when a toddler calls all four-legged animals "doggies." But we
also adjust, or accommodate, our schemas to fit the particulars of new
experiences. The child learns fairly quickly that the original "doggie"
schema is too broad, and accommodates by refining the category.
When new experiences just will not fit our old schemas, our schemas
may change to accommodate the experiences. When prejudiced people
perceive a minority person through their preconceived ideas, they are
assimilating. When experience forces them to modify their former
schemas, they are accommodating.
Ecclesiastes 3:1
Look carefully at the "devil's tuning fork"
below.
N o w look a w a y — n o , better first study it
some m o r e — a n d then look away and
draw it. Not so easy, is it? Because this
tuning fork is an impossible object, you
have no s c h e m a into which you can as­
similate what y o u see.
65
66
PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
Highly realistic art is easy to assimilate; it
requires for interpretation only those schemas already available from observing the
Science itself is a process of assimilation and accommodation. Sci­
entists interpret nature using their preconceived theories—for exam­
ple, that newborns are passive, incompetent creatures—to assimilate
what would otherwise be a bewildering body of disconnected observa­
tions. Then, as new observations collide with these theories, the theo­
ries must be changed or replaced to accommodate the findings. Thus the
new concept of the newborn as competent and active replaces the old
schema. That, Piaget believed, is how children (and adults) construct
reality using both assimilation and accommodation. What we know is
not reality exactly as it is, but our constructions of it.
world. Highly abstract art is difficult to
assimilate, which m a y explain the frustra­
tion it sometimes causes. W h e n art c o m ­
bines realism with abstraction, it allows
observers to impose m e a n i n g by stimulat­
ing them to stretch their schemas.
Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Stages Piaget went on to describe
cognitive development as occurring in four major stages (Table 3 - 1 ) .
P I A G E T ' S S T A C E 5 O F COGNITIVE D E V E L O P M E N T
Approximate age
Description of stage
Developmental milestones
Birth—2 years
Sensorimotor
Infant experiences the world through
senses and actions (looking, touching,
mouthing).
Object permanence (page 67);
stranger anxiety (page 68).
2 - 6 years
7 - 1 2 years
Teen years
Preoperational
Child represents things with words
and images, but cannot reason with logic.
Ability to pretend (page 67);
egocentrism (page 68).
Concrete operational
Child thinks logically about concrete
events; can grasp concrete analogies
and perform arithmetical operations.
Conservation (page 69);
mathematical transformations
(page 69).
Formal operational
Teenager develops abstract reasoning.
Scientific reasoning (page 92);
potential for mature moral
reasoning (pages 9 2 - 9 5 ) .
C H A P T E R
3
T h e Developing Child
T h e sensorimotor stage of development
b e g i n s in infancy a n d continues until
a b o u t a g e 2 . Very y o u n g children explore
The developing child, he believed, moves from one age-related plateau
to the next. Each plateau has distinctive characteristics that permit spe­
cific kinds of thinking. The differences between these kinds of thinking
are qualitative: They involve changes in the way the child thinks.
During the first stage, which occurs between birth and approxi­
mately age 2, infants are limited to sensorimotor intelligence: Their under­
standing of the world is restricted to their interactions with objects
through their senses and motor activity—through looking, touching,
sucking, grasping, and the like. In the preschool years of 2 to 6 most
children demonstrate preoperational intelligence: They can think about
objects without physically interacting with them, which means they
can begin to think about objects in a simple symbolic way.
This new type of thinking is reflected in the preschooler's ability to
pretend, to think about past events and anticipate future ones, and to
begin to use language. Children in the preoperational stage are not
able, however, to think in a truly logical fashion. They may figure out
that five plus three is eight and not instantly realize that three plus five
is also eight.
Beginning at about age 7, children demonstrate concrete operational
intelligence: They can perform the mental operations that produce logi­
cal thought, but they are able to think logically only about concrete
things. It is not until about age 12, when children enter the stage of
formal operational intelligence, that they are able to begin to think
hypothetically and abstractly. To appreciate how the mind of a child
grows, let's look more closely at each of these stages.
Sensorimotor Stage
During the sensorimotor stage, infants under­
stand their world in terms of their senses and the effects of their ac­
tions; they are aware only of what they can see, smell, suck, taste, and
grasp, and at first they seem to be unaware that things continue to exist
apart from their perceptions.
In one of his tests, Piaget would show an infant an appealing toy
and then flop his beret over it to see whether the infant searched for
the toy. Before the age of 8 months, they did not. They lacked object
permanence—the awareness that objects continue to exist when not
perceived. The infant lives in the present. What is out of sight is out of
mind. By 8 months, infants begin to develop what psychologists now
believe is a memory for things no longer seen. Hide the toy and the
the world t h r o u g h their senses, e n j o y i n g
the smell, feel, and taste of almost a n y ­
t h i n g they c a n g e t their hands o n . As the
child m o v e s into the preoperational stage,
at the a g e of a b o u t 18 months, pretend­
ing becomes possible. This child's imagi­
nation is still expressed t h r o u g h simple
c a r e - g i v i n g ; in another year the pretend
activities will b e c o m e m u c h more elabo­
rate.
" C h i l d r e n think not of what is past, nor
w h a t is to c o m e , but enjoy the present
time, which few of us d o . "
L a Bruyere, 1 6 4 5 - 1 6 9 6
Les
caraderes:
De
I'homme
67
68
PART
2
D e v e l o p m e n t over the Life S p a n
O b j e c t permanence. Y o u n g e r children lack
the sense that things continue to exist
w h e n not in sight; but for this 8 / 2 - m o n t h 1
infant will momentarily look for it. Within another month or two, the
infant will look for it even after being restrained for several seconds.
This flowering of recall occurs simultaneously with the emergence
of a fear of strangers, called stranger anxiety. Watch how infants of
different ages react when handed over to a stranger and you will notice
that, beginning at 8 or 9 months, they often will cry and reach for their
familiar caregivers. Is it a mere coincidence that object permanence and
stranger anxiety develop together? Probably not. After about 8 months
of age, the child has schemas for familiar faces; when a new face cannot
be assimilated into these remembered schemas, the infant becomes
distressed (Kagan, 1984). This link between cognitive development
and social behavior illustrates the interplay of brain maturation, cogni­
tive development, and social development.
Preoperational Stage
Seen through the eyes of Piaget, preschool chil­
dren are still far from being short grownups. Although aware of them­
selves, of time, and of the permanence of objects, they are, he said,
egocentric: They cannot perceive things from another's point of view.
The preschooler who blocks your view of the television while trying to
see it herself and the one who asks a question while you are on the
phone both assume that you see and hear what they see and hear.
When relating to a young child, it may help to remember that such
behaviors reflect a cognitive limitation: The egocentric preschooler has
difficulty taking another's viewpoint.
Preschoolers also find it easier to follow positive instructions
("Hold the puppy gently") than negative ones ("Don't squeeze the
puppy"). One characteristic of parents who abuse their children is that
they generally have no understanding of these limits. They perceive
their children as junior adults who are in control of their behavior
(Larrance & Twentyman, 1983). Thus children who stand in the way,
spill food, disobey negative instructions, or cry may be perceived as
willfully malicious.
Just before age 3 children do, however, become more capable of
thinking symbolically. Judy DeLoache (1987) discovered this when she
showed a group of ZV^-year-dlds a model of a room and hid a model toy
in it (say a miniature stuffed dog behind a miniature couch). The chil­
dren could easily remember where to find the miniature toy, but could
not readily locate the actual stuffed dog behind the couch in the real
room. When 3-year-olds were given a look at the model room, how­
ever, they would usually go right to the actual stuffed animal in the
old child, out of sight is not out of mind.
C H A P T E R
3
T h e Developing Child
real room, showing that they could think of the model as a symbol for
the room.
Piaget believed that during this preschool period and up to about
age 7, children are in what he called the preoperational stage—unable
to perform mental operations. For a 5-year-old, the quantity of milk
that is "too much" in a tall, narrow glass may become an acceptable
amount if poured into a short, wide glass. This is because the child
focuses only on the height dimension, and is incapable of reversing the
operation by mentally pouring it back. The child lacks the concept of
conservation—the principle that the quantity of a substance remains
the same despite changes in its shape. Children's conversations con­
firm this inability to reverse information (Phillips, 1969, p. 61):
"Do you have a brother?"
"Yes."
"What's his name?"
"Jim."
"Does Jim have a brother?"
"No."
Concrete Operational Stage With older children, Piaget would roll
one of two identical balls of clay into a rope shape and ask whether
there was more clay in the rope or the ball. Children who are in the
preoperational stage almost always say that the rope has more clay
because they assume "longer is more." They cannot mentally reverse
the clay-rolling process to see that the amount of clay is the same in
both shapes. But children who are in the concrete operational stage
realize that a given quantity remains the same no matter how its shape
changes. Piaget contended that during the stage of concrete operations
(roughly ages 7 to 12) children acquire the mental operations needed to
comprehend mathematical transformations and conservation. When
my daughter Laura was age 6, I was astonished at her inability to
reverse arithmetic operations—until considering Piaget. Asked, "What
is eight plus four?" she required 5 seconds to compute "twelve," and
another 5 seconds to then compute twelve minus four. By age 8, she
could reverse the process and answer the second question instantly.
Although the operations usually must involve concrete images of
physical actions or objects, not abstract ideas, preteen children exhibit
logic. Eleven-year-olds can mentally pour the milk back and forth be­
tween different-shaped glasses, so they realize that change in shape
does not mean change in quantity. They also enjoy jokes that allow
them to utilize their recently acquired concepts, such as conservation:
Mr. Jones went into a restaurant and ordered a whole pizza for his dinner.
When the waiter asked if he wanted it cut into 6 or 8 pieces, Mr. Jones
said, "Oh, you'd better make it 6, I could never eat 8 pieces!" (McGhee,
1976)
If Piaget was correct that children construct their understandings
through assimilation and accommodation, and that in early childhood
their thinking is radically different from adult thinking, what are the
implications for preschool and elementary school teachers? Might
teachers capitalize on what comes naturally to children? Believing that
children actively construct their own understandings, Piaget con­
tended that teachers should strive to "create the possibilities for a child
to invent and discover." Build on what children already know, allow
them to touch and see, to witness concrete demonstrations, to think for
themselves. Exploit their natural ways of thinking and learning. Be­
cause the young child is incapable of adult logic, teachers must under-
T h e preoperational child cannot perform
the mental operations essential to under­
standing conservation. A glass of milk
seems to be " m o r e " after being poured
into a tall, narrow g l a s s .
69
70
PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
Piaget's writings have influenced m a n y
educators to provide children with situa­
tions a n d e n c o u r a g e m e n t that will prompt
t h e m to do their o w n exploring a n d dis­
stand how children think, and therefore realize that what is simple and
obvious to them—that subtraction is the reverse of addition—may be
incomprehensible to a 6-year-old.
Reflections on Piaget's Theory
Piaget's stage theory is controversial.
Do children's cognitive abilities really go through distinct stages? Does
object permanence in fact appear rather abruptly, much as a tulip blos­
soms in spring? Today's researchers contend that we have underesti­
mated the competence of young children. Given very simple tasks,
preschoolers are not purely egocentric; they will adjust their explana­
tions to make them clearer to a listener who is blindfolded, and will
show a toy or picture with the front side facing the viewer (Gelman,
1979; Siegel & Hodkin, 1982). If questioned in a way that makes sense
to them, 5- and 6-year-olds will exhibit some understanding of conser­
vation (Donaldson, 1979). It seems, then, that the abilities to take an­
other's perspective and to perform mental operations are not utterly
absent in the preoperational stage—and then suddenly appear.
Rather, these abilities begin earlier than Piaget believed and develop
more gradually.
What remains of Piaget's ideas about the mind of the child? Plenty.
For Piaget identified and named important cognitive phenomena and
helped stimulate interest in studying how the mind develops. That we
today are adapting his ideas to accommodate new findings would not
surprise him.
SOCIAL
DEVELOPMENT
As we have seen, babies are social creatures from birth. Almost from
the start, parent and baby communicate through eye contact, touch,
smiles, and voice. The end result is social behavior that promotes in­
fants' survival and their emerging sense of self, so that they, too, even­
tually may bear and nurture a new generation.
In all cultures, infants develop an intense bond with those who
care for them. Beginning with newborns' attraction to humans in gen­
eral, infants soon come to prefer familiar faces and voices and then to
coo and gurgle when given their mothers' or fathers' attention. By 8
covering. For y o u n g e r children, especially,
direct observation has proved an effective
learning tool.
C H A P T E R
3
T h e Developing Child
months, when they are dealing with the linked milestones of object
permanence and stranger anxiety, they will crawl wherever mother or
father goes and will become distressed when separated from them. At
12 months many infants cling tightly to a parent when frightened or
anticipating separation and, when reunited, shower the parent with
smiles and hugs. No social behavior is more striking than this intense
infant love, called attachment, a powerful survival impulse that keeps
infants close to their caregivers. Among the early social responses—
love, fear, aggression—the first-and greatest is this bond of love.
Origins of Attachment
How does this parent-infant bond develop?
A number of elements work together to create this relationship.
Body Contact For many years developmental psychologists rea­
soned that infants became attached to those who satisfied their need
for nourishment. It makes perfect sense. But an accidental finding re­
vealed this explanation of attachment to be incomplete. For his 1950s
studies of the development of learning abilities, University of Wiscon­
sin psychologist Harry Harlow needed to breed monkeys. To equalize
the infant monkeys' early experiences and to prevent the spread of
disease, he separated the monkeys from their mothers shortly after
birth and raised them in sanitary, individual cages, which included a
cheesecloth baby blanket (Harlow & others, 1971). Surprisingly, the
infants became intensely attached to their blankets: When the blankets
were taken to be laundered, the monkeys were greatly distressed.
They acted as if they had been separated from their mothers.
Harlow soon recognized that this attachment to the blanket contra­
dicted the idea that attachment is derived from the association with
nourishment. But could he demonstrate this more convincingly? Doing
so would require some way to pit the drawing power of a food source
against the contact comfort of the blanket. Harlow's creative solution
consisted of two artificial mothers—one a bare wire cylinder with a
wooden head, the other a similar cylinder wrapped with foam rubber
and covered with terrycloth. Either could be associated with feeding
through an attached bottle.
Even when reared with a nourishing wire mother and a
nonnourishing cloth mother, the monkeys overwhelmingly preferred
the cloth mother (Figure 3 - 7 ) . Like human infants clinging to their
mothers, they would cling to the cloth mother when anxious and
would use her as a base of security from which to venture out into the
environment, as if attached to the mother by an invisible elastic band
that stretches so far and then pulls the infant back. Further studies
with Margaret Harlow and others revealed that other qualities—
rocking, warmth, and feeding—could boost the magnetism of the com­
fortable cloth mother.
In human infants, too, attachment usually grows from body con­
tact with parents who are soft and warm and who rock, pat, and feed.
This may help explain the recent finding that infants whose parents
were instructed to carry them for at least 3 hours a day cried less than
other infants (Hunziker & Barr, 1986). The net result of Harlow's re­
search should also reassure the fathers of breast-fed infants: Attach­
ment does not depend on feeding alone.
Familiarity Another key to attachment is familiarity (Rheingold,
1985). Infants prefer faces and objects with which they are familiar. In
certain animals, attachments based on familiarity form during a critical
period—a restricted time period during which certain events must take
Figure 3 - 7
W h e n Harry Harlow reared
m o n k e y s with t w o artificial m o t h e r s — o n e
a bare wire cylinder with a w o o d e n head
a n d an attached f e e d i n g bottle a n d the
other a cylinder covered with foam rubber
a n d w r a p p e d with terrycloth but without
a f e e d i n g bottle—they preferred the c o m ­
fortable cloth mother to the nourishing
wire mother. It is interesting that m o n k e y s
also prefer the texture of terrycloth to the
u n m o n k e y - l i k e smoothness of satins a n d
silks, a n d that h u m a n infants are similarly
more soothed by a textured than a
s m o o t h blanket ( M a c c o b y , 1 9 8 0 ) .
72
PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
place if proper development is to occur—shortly after birth. The first
moving object that a gosling, duckling, or chick sees during the hours
shortly after hatching is normally its mother, and thereafter the young
fowl follows her, and her alone. Konrad Lorenz (1937) explored this
rigid attachment process, called imprinting. He wondered what duck­
lings would do if he were the first moving creature they observed.
What they did was follow him around. Further tests revealed that baby
birds would imprint to a variety of moving objects—an animal of an­
other species, a box on wheels, a bouncing ball—and that, once
formed, this attachment was often difficult to reverse (Colombo, 1982).
The attachment of infants to their parents is reciprocated. Most
mammals lick and groom their newborns during the first hours after
birth and, if prevented from doing so, may later reject their offspring.
Might there be a critical period during which contact triggers such
bonding in humans?
Proponents of bonding maintain that physical contact during the
first hours after birth boosts parent-infant attachment (Kennell &
Klaus, 1982). But developmental psychologists Michael Lamb (1982),
Susan Goldberg (1983), and Barbara Myers (1984a, 1984b) scrutinized
the research on mother-infant bonding and each came away uncon­
vinced. Either the studies were seriously flawed, they reported, or the
effects of physical "bonding" are both minimal and temporary. Hu­
mans don't have a precise critical period for becoming attached.
Critics of the bonding notion welcome the trend toward involving
parents in the childbirth process. The danger, they suggest, comes in
making parents who have not experienced early contact—including
mothers who have had cesareans or parents who have adopted chil­
dren—feel inadequate. These parents may be led by proponents of
bonding to fear that they and their child have missed out on something
terribly important. And that, say the critics, is simply not true.
Likewise, there is little evidence that breast-feeding is psychologi­
cally more advantageous to an infant than bottle-feeding. Bottle-fed
infants usually enjoy nearly the same cuddling, eye contact, and sen­
sory experience as nursing infants. To be sure, breast-feeding is com­
mendable as an intimate and pleasurable way of providing ideal nutri­
tion—as ideal as cow's milk is for calves. But to be bottle-fed is not to
be psychologically handicapped (Fergusson & others, 1987).
Responsive Parenting
How are children's attachments linked with
parental behavior? Placed in a strange situation (usually a laboratory
playroom), some children show secure attachment: In the mother's pres­
ence they play comfortably, happily exploring their new environment;
when she leaves, they are distressed; when she returns, they seek
contact with her. Other infants show insecure attachment: They are less
likely to explore their surroundings and may even cling to their
mother; when the mother leaves, they cry loudly; and when she re­
turns, they may be indifferent or even hostile toward her (Ainsworth,
1973; Ainsworth & others, 1978). What accounts for these differences?
The innate differences among infants is one likely answer. Some
babies may be more disposed to forming a secure attachment just as,
from birth, some babies are more easily held, cuddled, and comforted.
But there is more to infant differences than biology. Mary Ainsworth
(1979) explored another possible influence on attachment: the mother's
behavior. She observed mother-infant pairs at home during the first 6
months and then later observed the 1-year-old infants in a strange
situation without their mother. Sensitive, responsive mothers—
mothers who continually noticed what their babies were doing and
When imprinting studies go awry .
. .
A l t h o u g h breast-feeding provides babies
with superior nutrition a n d can increase a
mother's sense of intimacy with her in­
fant, fathers, too, love to feed their b a ­
bies, a n d there is little evidence that
breast-feeding significantly affects the in­
fant's psychological development. T h e in­
timacy evident in this photo will benefit
both infant a n d father.
CHAPTER
responded appropriately—tended to have infants who became se­
curely attached. Insensitive, unresponsive mothers—mothers who at­
tended to their babies when they felt like doing so but ignored them at
other times—tended to have infants who became insecurely attached.
The Harlows' monkey studies, in which the artificial mothers were the
ultimate in unresponsiveness, produced even more striking conse­
quences. When put in strange situations without their artificial moth­
ers, the deprived infants were more than distressed—they were terri­
fied.
Although informative, such studies would probably not be con­
ducted in today's climate of concern for the welfare of animals.
FATHER
T h e Developing Child
73
M o n k e y s raised by artificial mothers were
terror-stricken when placed in strange sit­
uations without their surrogate mothers.
CARE
Perhaps you are wondering why t h e
focus of so much research has been on
mothers and not on fathers, t o o . The
c o m m o n assumption, long evident in
court child-custody decisions, has been
that fathers are less interested and less
c o m p e t e n t in child c a r e than are m o t h ­
ers. In both subtle and not-so-subtle
ways, psychologists have a c c e p t e d this
assumption. Infants w h o lack m o t h e r
c a r e a r e said to suffer "maternal depri­
vation"; those lacking father c a r e are
said merely to experience "father a b ­
sence."
It is true t h a t across the world m o t h ­
ers tend to a s s u m e m o r e responsibility
for infant care, and t h a t a breast-feed­
Michael Lamb (1979): "Mothers and fa­
thers can be equally effective as parents.
They just have different styles."
3
departure as by their mothers'. M o r e ­
over, infants whose fathers have
shared in their c a r e , for example, by
changing diapers, are m o r e secure
when left with a stranger.
Looking for differences, research
psychologists have also uncovered sev­
eral distinctive ways in which fathers
and mothers interact with their infants.
Fathers tend to smile less at their babies
(males smile less at everyone), to spend
m o r e of their interaction in play rather
than caretaking (especially with sons),
and to play with m o r e physical excite­
ment (Parke, 1 9 8 1 ) .
However, when fathers are the pri­
mary caregivers, they interact with
ing m o t h e r and nursing infant have
wonderfully coordinated biological sys­
their babies m o r e as mothers typically
do. This suggests t h a t father-mother
tems t h a t predispose their responsive­
ness t o o n e a n o t h e r ( M a c c o b y , 1 9 8 0 ) .
Nevertheless, many modern fathers a r e
differences are not biologically fixed,
but have social roots as well. Animal
research confirms this. W h e n the Har­
becoming m o r e involved in infant care,
and researchers are becoming m o r e
lows c a g e d mothers and fathers with
their infant monkeys, the fathers w e r e
interested in fathers.
protective and affectionate t o w a r d
their infants and m o r e likely than
O n e of t h e leading father-watchers,
Ross Parke ( 1 9 8 1 ) , reported that fa­
thers can be just as interested in, sensi­
mothers to e n g a g e in physical play.
Within
two-parent
families,
both
tive to, and affectionate t o w a r d their
infants as mothers are. Although m o t h ­
parents have yet a n o t h e r gift to offer:
their support of o n e another. Mothers
ers typically do m o s t of t h e infant c a r e ,
fathers are as capable (at least when
researchers are watching). It also seems
and fathers w h o support o n e another
and w h o sense this mutual support and
a g r e e m e n t in child-rearing also tend to
that although most infants prefer their
mothers when anxious, when left alone
be m o r e responsive to their infants and
to feel m o r e c o m p e t e n t as parents
they are as distressed by their fathers'
(Dickie, 1 9 8 7 ) .
74
PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
Effects of Attachment What have researchers learned about the ef­
fects of attachment on later development?
Secure Attachment Breeds Social Competence
It a trusting, secure at­
tachment has lasting benefits, then the quality of an infant's attach­
ments should predict the child's social competence in the years that
follow. Even adult romantic love styles exhibit childlike secure or inse­
cure attachment (Hazen & Shaver, 1987). But do our early attachment
patterns actually predict our later social behavior?
At the University of Minnesota, Alan Sroufe and his co-workers
(Sroufe, 1978; Sroufe & others, 1983) confirmed that infants' attach­
ments do predict their later social competence. Sroufe reported that
infants who are securely attached at 12 to 18 months of age—those
who use their mother as a base for comfortably exploring the world
and as a haven when distressed—function more confidently as 2- to
3V2-year-olds. Given challenging tasks, they are more enthusiastic and
persistent. When with other children, they are more outgoing and re­
sponsive.
Developmental theorist Erik Erikson, whose ideas we will consider
further in Chapter 4, would say that such children approach life with a
sense of basic trust—a sense that the world is predictable and reliable—
rather than mistrust. Erikson theorized that infants whose needs are
well met by sensitive caregivers form a lifelong attitude of trust rather
than fear. Basic trust is the first of Erikson's proposed stages in
children's social development (see Table 3 - 2 ) .
Approximate age
Description of stage
Infancy
(1st year)
Trust vs. mistrust
'If needs are met, infant develops a
sense of basic trust.
Toddler
(2nd year)
Autonomy vs. shame and doubt
Toddler strives to learn independence and
self-confidence.
Preschooler
( 3 - 5 years)
Initiative vs. guilt
Preschooler learns to initiate tasks and
grapples with self-control.
Elementary School
(6 years to
puberty)
Competence vs. inferiority
Child learns either to feel effective or
inadequate.
Other psychologists believe the child's social competence reflects
not the early parenting but the continued responsive parenting that
these children are still receiving when retested (Lamb, 1987). The
genes shared by competent parents and their competent children may
also predispose their similar behavior (Goldsmith & Alansky, 1987;
Plomin & others, 1985).
" O u t of the conflict between trust a n d
mistrust, the infant develops hope, which
is the earliest form of w h a t gradually be­
comes faith in a d u l t s . "
Erik Erikson ( 1 9 8 3 )
C H A P T E R
3
T h e Developing Child
The attachments of early childhood in time relax. Whether raised
entirely at home or also in a day care center, whether living in America,
Guatemala, or the Kalahari Desert, anxiety over being separated from
parents peaks at around 13 months and then gradually declines
(Kagan, 1976; see Figure 3 - 8 ) . With time, children become familiar
with a wider and wider range of situations, and with the advent of
language they communicate with strangers more freely.
Does this mean that, as we develop, our need for and love of oth­
ers fades away? Hardly. In other ways our capacity for love grows, and
our pleasure in touching and holding those we love never ceases. The
powerful parental love nonetheless gradually relaxes, allowing chil­
dren to move out into the world. One might even say that much of the
life cycle story—from fetus to birth and infancy, to adolescence, to
marriage and parenthood, to old age and death—boils down to two
realities: attachment and separation.
Deprivation of Attachment If social competence is affected by a se­
cure attachment, what are the outcomes of parental deprivation or pro­
longed separation? One way to study the benefits of positive early
nurturing experiences is to observe the development of children de­
nied such experiences. In all of psychology, no research literature is
more saddening. Children reared in institutions without the stimula­
tion and attention of a regular caregiver, or locked away at home under
conditions of extreme neglect, are frequently pathetic creatures—
withdrawn, frightened, speechless. Adopted into a loving home, they
usually progress rapidly, especially in their cognitive development.
They are particularly likely to do well if they were in the company of
other children while they were deprived of adult contact. Neverthe­
less, they often bear scars from their early neglect (Rutter, 1979).
Most abusive parents report being battered or neglected as chil­
dren (Kempe & Kempe, 1978). Although most abused children do not
later become abusive parents, 30 percent do abuse their children—a
rate six times higher than the national rate of child abuse (Kaufman &
Zigler, 1987). Moreover, young children who have been terrorized
through sexual abuse or wartime atrocities (beatings, witnessing tor­
ture, and living in constant fear) also suffer scars; nightmares, depres­
sion, and a troubled adolescence are frequent outcomes (Browne &
Finkelhor, 1986; Goleman, 1987).
These findings were underscored by the Harlows. They reared
monkeys not only with artificial mothers but also alone in barren cages
or, worse, in total isolation from even the sight and sound of other
monkeys. If socially deprived in these ways for 6 months or longer
(corresponding to the first 2 years or more of human life), the monkeys
were socially devastated. They either cowered in fright or lashed out in
aggression when placed with other monkeys their age. Upon reaching
sexual maturity, most were incapable of mating. Females who were
artificially impregnated often were neglectful, sadistically cruel, or
even murderous toward their firstborn offspring. The unloved had
become the unloving.
The new generation of unloved animals would nevertheless per­
sistently approach and cling to their abusive mothers. In fact, so pow­
erful was the infant monkey's drive for attachment that even artificial
"monster mothers"—mothers constructed to occasionally blast com­
pressed air, poke spikes through their terrycloth bodies, or fling their
infant off—could only temporarily break their infant's attachment.
When the monster mother calmed down, the pitiful infant would re-
Figure 3 - 8
Infants' anxiety over separa­
tion from parents. In an experiment,
g r o u p s of infants w h o had a n d had not
experienced day care were left alone by
their mothers in an unfamiliar room. In
both g r o u p s , the percentage w h o cried
w h e n the mother left peaked at about 13
months. (From K a g a n , 1976.)
M o n k e y s raised in total isolation from the
sight or s o u n d of other m o n k e y s for more
than 6 months were terrified of other
m o n k e y s and either lashed out a g g r e s ­
sively or c o w e r e d in fright.
75
76
PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
turn, clinging again, as if all were forgiven. Indeed, the distress of
abuse seemed even to intensify the infant's clinging, a phenomenon
sometimes observed among abused human children.
Disruption of Attachment
What happens to an infant when attach­
ment is disrupted? Does being uprooted, even from neglectful or abu­
sive parents, predispose the child to later emotional difficulties? These
questions bear heavily on custody decisions in cases of child neglect or
abuse.
Separated from their families, both monkey and human infants
become agitated and, before long, withdrawn and even despairing
(Bowlby, 1973; Mineka & Suomi, 1978). Fearing that such extreme
stress might cause lasting damage (and when in doubt acting to protect
parents' rights), the courts have generally been very reluctant to re­
move children from their homes. However, it seems that infants gener­
ally recover from the distress of separation if placed in a more positive
and stable environment. In studies of adopted children, Leon Yarrow
and his co-workers (1973) found that when children over 6 months of
age were removed from their foster mothers they initially had difficul­
ties eating, sleeping, and relating to their new mothers. But by 10 years
of age there was little discernible difference in the adjustment of chil­
dren who had been placed before the age of 6 months (with little ac­
companying distress) and those who had been adopted between the
ages of 6 and 16 months (with much more distress). Although adop­
tions at later ages might more often be permanently disruptive, it
seems that most year-old infants can form new attachments without
permanent emotional scars. Foster care with a series of foster families,
or repeated removal from a mother and then reunion with her, can be
very disruptive, however.
" W e can hazard a tentative conclusion:
T h e child's later adjustment will be pri­
marily determined by the quality of the
relationship with the new caretakers, not
Does Day Care Disrupt Attachment?
In 1950, when only 14 percent
of American mothers worked outside the home, society's Perfect Mom
was at the door with cookies, milk, and a sympathetic ear when her
children arrived home from school. Today, with half of mothers of
American children under age 5. employed, society's Supermom pur­
sues a successful career while sharing parental duties with Dad. Where
are these children of mothers who work full-time? Almost 50 percent
are cared for in someone else's home. The rest are nearly evenly di­
vided between day care centers and being cared for in their own
homes. Of this last group, 20 percent are cared for by sitters, 44 percent
by fathers, and 36 percent by another relative (Bureau of the Census,
1987).
During the 1950s and '60s, when Perfect Mom was the social norm,
the research questions were, "Is day care bad for children? Does it
disrupt children's attachments to their parents?" For the high-quality
day care programs most commonly studied, the answers were no
(Belsky, 1984). In Mother Care/Other Care, developmental psychologist
Sandra Scarr (1986) explains that children are "biologically sturdy indi­
viduals . . . who can thrive in a wide variety of life situations." Today,
the questions have therefore shifted to the effect that different forms of
day care may have on different types and ages of children. We now
know enough about the consequences of child neglect to distinguish
good from poor day care. Scarr and Richard Weinberg (1986) explain:
"Good care means three or four infants and toddlers per care giver
and six to eight preschoolers. . . . Good care also means a cheerful,
stimulating, and safe physical environment. . . . " The ideal, then, is a
verbally stimulating environment in which any child can frequently be
seen talking with an adult caregiver (Phillips, McCartney, & Scarr, 1987).
by the experience of separation."
Eleanor M a c c o b y (1980)
C H A P T E R
3
T h e Developing Child
High-quality day care provides a safe,
stimulating environment a n d a caregiver
for every six to eight toddlers.
Although parents of children 2 years and older may gain some
relief from knowing that day care can mean high-quality child care, the
scientific jury is still debating infant day care. Many developmentalists,
including Scarr, believe that high-quality infant care does not hinder
secure attachments. Fellow developmental psychologists Jay Belsky
(1988) and Edward Zigler (1986) caution that, in Belsky's words, "Chil­
dren growing up in families using more than 20 hours per week of
non-parental care in their first year of life are at heightened risk of
seeming insecure as 1-year-olds and of being disobedient and aggres­
sive at older ages."
One striking outcome of research on mother care and other care is
how little quality time children receive from parents, employed or not.
One national survey revealed that employed mothers average only 11
minutes and fathers 8 minutes per weekday in child-centered activities
such as reading, conversing, and playing with their children; homemaker mothers devote not much more—only about 30 minutes per
day—to such activities (Timmer & others, 1985-1986). Moreover, there
is little disagreement that the half million preschool children actually
left alone for part of the time their parents are at work deserve better! So
do those children who merely exist for 9 hours a day in minimally
equipped, understaffed centers with untrained and poorly paid care­
givers. What all children need is a consistent, warm relationship with
people whom they can learn to trust.
Self-Concept If attachment is the number one social achievement of
infancy, for childhood it is the construction of a positive sense of self.
By the end of childhood, at about age 12, most children have devel­
oped a clear self-concept—a sense of their own personal worth and
social identity. When and how does this sense of self develop, and
how can parents foster a child's self-esteem?
"Is my baby aware of herself—does she know that she is a person
distinct from others?" The baby cannot talk, so we cannot ask her.
Perhaps, however, the infant's behavior could provide clues to the be­
ginnings of her self-awareness. But what sorts of behavior? In 1877,
biologist Charles Darwin offered one idea: Self-awareness begins when
a child recognizes herself in a mirror. By this indicator, self-recognition
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emerges gradually over about a year, starting in roughly the sixth
month, when the child reaches toward the mirror to touch her image as
if it were another child (Damon & Hart, 1982).
How can we know when the infant recognizes that the girl in the
mirror is indeed herself and not just an agreeable playmate? In a simple
variation of the mirror procedure, researchers surreptitiously dabbed
rouge on their subjects' noses before placing them in front of the mir­
ror. Beginning at 15 to 18 months, children, upon seeing the red spot,
will touch their noses (Gallup & Suarez, 1986). Apparently, 18-montholds have a schema of how their faces should look; it is as if they
wonder, "What is that spot doing on my face?"
Beginning with this simple self-awareness, the child's self-concept
gradually becomes stronger. By school age, children begin to describe
themselves in terms of their gender, their group memberships, and
their psychological traits. They come to see themselves as good and
skillful in some ways but not others. They form a concept of which
traits, ideally, they would like to have, and by age 8 or 10 their selfimage has become quite stable.
Children's views of themselves affects their actions. Children who
have formed a positive self-concept tend to be more confident, inde­
pendent, optimistic, assertive, and sociable (Maccoby, 1980). All this
raises a profoundly important question: How can parents encourage a
positive self-concept?
Child-Rearing Practices
Some parents spank, some reason; some
parents are strict, some are lax; some parents seem indifferent to their
children, some liberally hug and kiss them. Whether such differences
in parenting affect children's behavior has been the subject of much
research. The most heavily researched aspect of parenting has been
how, and to what extent, parents seek to control their children.
Several investigators have identified three specific styles of child
management: (1) permissive, (2) authoritarian, and (3) authoritative.
Permissive parents tend to submit to their children's desires, make few
demands, and use little punishment. Authoritarian parents impose
rules and expect obedience: "Don't interrupt." "Don't leave your room
a mess." "Don't stay out late or you'll be grounded." "Why? Because I
said s o . " Authoritative parents exert control by establishing rules and
consistently enforcing them, but also by explaining the reasons for
their rules and, especially with older children, encouraging open dis­
cussion when making the rules. Studies by Stanley Coopersmith
(1967), Diana Baumrind (1983), and John Buri and others (1988) reveal
that the children with the highest self-esteem and most self-reliance
tend to have warm, concerned, authoritative parents.
What might account for this finding? As later chapters will explain,
many experiments indicate that people become more motivated and
self-confident if they experience control over their lives; those who
experience little control tend to see themselves as somewhat helpless
and incompetent. Moreover, children who sense enough control to be
able to attribute their behaviors to their own choices ("I obey because I
am good") internalize their behaviors more than do children who com­
ply solely because they are coerced ("I obey or I get in bad trouble").
Of the three parenting styles studied, it seems that authoritative
parenting provides children with the greatest sense of control over
their own lives for two reasons. First, authoritative parents openly dis­
cuss family rules, by explaining them to younger children and reason­
ing about them with older children. When such rules seem not so
Mirror images are fascinating to infants
from the a g e of about 6 months, but the
recognition that the child in the mirror is
" m e " does not happen until a b o u t 1 8
months.
C H A P T E R
3
T h e Developing Child
Studies s u g g e s t that consistency in enforc­
ing rules, c o m b i n e d with calm discussion
a n d explanation, helps children achieve
self-control.
much imposed as negotiated, older children feel more self-control
(Baumrind, 1983; Lewis, 1981). Second, when parents enforce rules
with consistent, predictable consequences, the child controls the out­
come. Recall that infants become more attached to parents who sensi­
tively and predictably respond to their behaviors. Such infants experi­
ence control.
It is when the consequences become extreme—perhaps a threat­
ened spanking for noncompliance—that the child of authoritarian par­
ents is left with no feeling of choice. Similarly, children may lose their
sense of control when their parents nag or explode unpredictably.
Given permissive parents, children learn early that their own coercive
behavior—whining, yelling, tantrums—brings desired results (Patter­
son, 1986). Thus Eleanor Maccoby (1980, p. 389) concluded that "skill­
ful parents must operate within a very delicate balance of forces. They
need to obtain compliance to reasonable demands—for the child's, the
parents', and the family's sake—without . . . destroying their
children's sense of [choice]."
Before jumping to any conclusions about the consequences of dif­
ferent parenting styles, we must heed a caution. The evidence is corre­
lational. It tells us that certain child-rearing practices (say, being firm
but open) are associated with certain childhood outcomes (say, social
competence). But as we have seen before, correlation does not neces­
sarily reveal cause and effect. There may be other possible explanations
(see Figure 3 - 9 ) . Perhaps socially mature, agreeable children elicit
greater trust and more reasonable treatment from their parents than do
less competent and less cooperative children. Or perhaps some other
unnoted characteristic of authoritative parents produces their
children's competence. For example, such parents are less likely to be
enduring the stresses of poverty or recent divorce (Hetherington,
1979), and they are more likely to be well educated—factors that might
also be linked with children's competence. Or, as was suggested ear­
lier, maybe competent parents and their competent children share
genes that predispose social competence. Thus, knowing that parents'
behavior is related to their children's behavior does not prove cause
and effect.
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When considering "expert" child-rearing advice—of which there
seems to be no shortage—we should also remember that it inevitably
reflects the advice-giver's values. Even if we knew exactly how to en­
courage the development of any given trait in children, we could not
advise parents without assuming that some traits are to be preferred
over others. But which? Should the chief end of childhood be unques­
tioning obedience? Then an authoritarian style could be recom­
mended. Are sociability and self-reliance a higher end? Then firm but
open authoritative parenting is advisable. Different experts have differ­
ent values, which, along with the uncertainties of cause and effect,
helps explain their disagreements.
Parents struggle with conflicting advice and with the other stresses
of child-rearing. Indeed, the tens of thousands of dollars it costs to
raise a child buys 20 years of not only joy and love but also worry and
irritation. Yet for most parents, a child is a personal investment in the
human future. To paraphrase psychiatrist Carl Jung, we reach back­
ward into our parents and forward into our children, and through their
children into a future that we will never see, but about which we must
nonetheless care.
R E F L E C T I O N S ON A D E V E L O P M E N T A L
I S S U E : G E N E S AND E X P E R I E N C E
Our journey through developmental psychology is set in the context of
three pervasive issues: whether development is (1) steered more by
genes or experience, and whether it is characterized (2) by continuous
growth or distinct stages, and (3) by stability or by change. Let's step
back for a moment and take stock of current thinking on the naturenurture issue.
Everyone agrees: Each of us is influenced by genes and experience
working together. The real question is: How important is each? For
physical attributes such as hair color, the genetic factor predominates.
For psychological attributes, the answer is less obvious. In Chapter 12,
Intelligence, we will examine the thorny debate over genetic and envi­
ronmental determinants of intelligence. Here, let us consider the pro­
vocative findings of several recent investigations into the inheritance of
personal and social traits.
TEMPERAMENT
Infants and young children cannot take personality tests, so investiga­
tors observe their actual behavior and infer their temperament. Tem­
perament is a catchall term for the rudiments of personality and gener­
ally refers to the child's emotional excitability—whether the child is
reactive (responds readily to stimuli), intense, and fidgety, or easygo­
ing, quiet, and placid.
From the first weeks of life, "easy" babies are cheerful, relaxed,
and predictable in feeding and sleeping. "Difficult" babies are more
irritable, intense, and unpredictable (Thomas & Chess, 1986). More­
over, the most emotionally reactive newborns tend also to be the most
reactive 9-month-olds (Wilson & Matheny, 1986), and the most emo­
tionally intense preschoolers tend to be relatively intense as young
adults (Larsen & Diener, 1987). Physiological tests reveal that these
temperamental qualities are linked to a reactive sympathetic nervous
system (Kagan & others, 1988). Infant monkeys also vary in tempera-
Faced with a mild stress, some children
are characteristically more anxious, just as
some m o n k e y s are naturally more fearful.
C H A P T E R
ment; from birth, some are timid and fearful, others more relaxed
(Suomi, 1983).
Are such temperamental differences hereditary? Several lines of
evidence indicate they are indeed. Animal breeders selectively mate
dogs, horses, and other animals to be either highly reactive or easygo­
ing. In one selective breeding study, Finnish psychologist Kirsti
Lagerspetz (1979) took normal albino mice and bred the most aggres­
sive ones with one another and the least aggressive ones with one
another. After repeating this for twenty-six generations, she had one
set of fierce mice and one of placid mice.
When researcher Stephen Suomi placed genetically predisposed
"uptight" versus "easygoing" monkeys with foster mothers who were
themselves uptight or easygoing, heredity tended to override rearing.
The naturally uptight infant monkeys later reacted more anxiously to
the stress of separation from their mother, even if they had been raised
by easygoing, nurturant foster mothers (Asher, 1987).
To judge from twin studies (see below), genes help determine
human temperament, too. Moreover, newborns of different racial
groups exhibit differing temperaments. Babies of Caucasian and Afri­
can descent tend to be more reactive and irritable than Chinese and
Native American babies (who share a common Asian descent). For
example, if restrained, undressed, or covered with a cloth, Caucasian
babies will typically respond more intensely (Freedman, 1979).
3
T h e Developing Child
M o s t N a v a j o babies calmly accept the
cradleboard; C a u c a s i a n babies protest v i g ­
orously. Findings like these s u g g e s t that
the rudiments of personality are to some
extent genetically influenced.
STUDIES O F T W I N S
Selective breeding experiments seek to vary heredity but not environ­
ment, thereby revealing an effect of heredity. Could we also do the
reverse—vary environment but not heredity—to seek the effect of en­
vironment? Happily for our purposes, in three or four human births
out of every thousand, nature has given us ready-made subjects for
this experiment. Identical twins develop from a single fertilized egg
that splits into two genetically identical replicas, each of which be­
comes a person (Figure 3 - 1 0 ) . Fraternal twins, who develop from sep­
arate eggs, are genetically no more similar than ordinary brothers and
sisters.
Curiously, twinning rates vary by race.
Caucasians have twins roughly twice as
often as Asians, and half as often as
blacks ( D i a m o n d , 1986).
Figure 3 - 1 0
Identical twins develop
from a single fertilized e g g ; fraternal twins
from two.
Do identical twins, being genetic replicas of one another, develop
more similar personalities than fraternal twins? To find out, Birgitta
Floderus-Myrhed and her colleagues (1980) administered tests of extraversion (outgoingness) and neuroticism (psychological instability) to
nearly 13,000 pairs of Swedish identical and fraternal twins, as did
Richard Rose and his colleagues (1988) with 7000 pairs of Finnish
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Development over the Life Span
twins. Their findings: On both of these personality dimensions identi­
cal twins were much more similar than fraternal twins, suggesting that
there is substantial genetic influence on both traits.
Other dimensions of personality also reflect genetic influences.
John Loehlin and Robert Nichols (1976) gave a battery of question­
naires to 850 identical and fraternal twin pairs who were identified
while competing for National Merit scholarships. Once again, identical
twins were substantially more similar, and in a variety of ways—in
abilities, personality, and even interests. However, most of the identi­
cal twins also reported being treated more alike than did fraternal
twins, raising the possibility that their experience rather than their
genes accounts for their similarity. Not so, said Loehlin and Nichols,
because identical twins whose parents treated them alike were not psy­
chologically more alike than identical twins who were treated less simi­
larly.
T h e M i n n e s o t a Twin Study
Better than studying identical twins
who recall being reared differently would be to study identical twins
who were reared in different environments. To the extent that such
twins differ from one another (more than do identical twins reared
together), one could only credit their differing environments. Thus in
1979 when University of Minnesota psychologist Thomas Bouchard
read a newspaper account of the reuniting of 39-year-old twins who
had been separated from infancy, he seized the opportunity and flew
them to Minneapolis for extensive tests. Bouchard was looking for dif­
ferences; what "the Jim twins," Jim Lewis and Jim Springer, presented
were amazing similarities (Holden, 1980a, 1980b). Both had married
women named Linda, divorced, and married women named Betty.
One had a son James Alan, the other a son James Allan. Both had dogs
named Toy, chain-smoked Salems, served as sheriff's deputies, drove
Chevrolets, chewed their fingernails to the nub, enjoyed stock car rac­
ing, had basement workshops, and had built circular white benches
around trees in their yards. They also had similar medical histories:
Both gained 10 pounds at about the same time and then lost it; both
suffered what they mistakenly believed were heart attacks, and both
began having late-afternoon headaches at age 18.
Equally striking similarities were presented by identical twins
Oskar Stohr and Jack Yufe, one of whom was raised by his grand-
Identical twins: 6 years a g o these t w o
girls shared the same fertilized e g g .
" T h e Jim t w i n s . " Despite h a v i n g been
separated at birth, these identical twins
have remarkable similarities. Here each is
s h o w n in his basement carpentry w o r k ­
s h o p , only one of the " c o i n c i d e n c e s " psy
chologist T h o m a s Bouchard discovered.
C H A P T E R
mother in Germany as a Catholic and a Nazi, while the other was
raised by his father in the Caribbean as a Jew. Nevertheless, they share
traits and habits galore: They like spicy foods and sweet liqueurs, have
a habit of falling asleep in front of the television, flush the toilet before
using it, store rubber bands on their wrists, and dip buttered toast in
their coffee. Stohr is domineering toward women and yells at his wife,
as did Yufe before he was separated.
Aided by publicity in magazine and newspaper stories, Bouchard,
David Lykken, Auke Tellegen, and their colleagues have located and
studied some four dozen pairs of identical twins reared apart. They
continue to be impressed by the similarities not only of tastes and
physical attributes but also of assessments of personality, abilities, and
even fears (Tellegen & others, 1988). The more bizarre similarities—
such as flushing the toilet before using it—exist not because we have
genes for specific behaviors, contends Bouchard; rather, presented
with a similar range of options, similarly disposed people tend to make
similar choices. Even in the domains where heredity strongly influ­
ences personality (such as "social potency"—having an assertive, takecharge nature), it does so not through a single gene but through a
complex combination of genes.
Criticism of Twin Studies The cute stories do not impress
Bouchard's critics. They contend that if any two strangers of the same
sex and age were to spend hours comparing their behaviors and life
histories, they would probably discover a string of coincidental similar­
ities. Even the more impressive data from the personality assessments
(Bouchard, 1984) are clouded by the fact that many of the separated
twins were actually together for several months before adoption, or
had been reunited for some years before being tested. Moreover, adop­
tion agencies tend to place separated twins in similar homes. When
people come from a narrow range of environments, the hereditary fac­
tor will play a bigger role. Nevertheless, the Swedish, National Merit,
and Minnesota twin studies illustrate why scientific opinion is shifting
toward a greater appreciation of genetic influences, and why further
research is needed.
3
T h e Developing Child
" I n s o m e domains it looks as t h o u g h our
identical twins reared apart are . . . just as
similar as identical twins reared together.
N o w that's an a m a z i n g finding a n d I can
assure y o u none of us w o u l d have e x ­
pected that degree of similarity."
T h o m a s Bouchard ( 1 9 8 1 )
C o i n c i d e n c e s are not unique to twins.
Patricia Kern of C o l o r a d o w a s born
M a r c h 1 3 , 1941 and n a m e d Patricia A n n
C a m p b e l l . Patricia DiBiasi of O r e g o n also
w a s born M a r c h 1 3 , 1941 and n a m e d
Patricia A n n C a m p b e l l . Both had fathers
n a m e d Robert, w o r k e d as bookkeepers,
and have children ages 21 and 19. Both
studied c o s m e t o l o g y , enjoy oil painting as
a h o b b y , a n d married military m e n , within
11 days of each other. T h e y are not g e ­
netically related. (From an AP report,
M a y 2 , 1983.)
ADOPTION S T U D I E S
Adoption studies offer additional clues. For any given trait we can ask
whether adopted children are more like their adoptive parents, who
contributed a home environment, or their biological parents, who con­
tributed their genes. Sandra Scarr (Scarr, 1982; Scarr & Weinberg,
1983), John Loehlin and his colleagues (1982, 1985, 1987), and Robert
Plomin and John DeFries (1985) therefore studied hundreds of adop­
tive families in Minnesota, Texas, and Colorado, respectively. The
stunning finding of these studies is that people who grow up together
do not much resemble one another in personality, whether they are
biologically related or not (Rowe, 1987). Moreover, in many studies of
families without twins, the personalities of parents have been astonish­
ingly unrelated to the personalities of their children. Sandra Scarr and
her colleagues (1981) summarized the findings vividly:
" T w o children in the same family [are on
a v e r a g e ] as different from one another as
are pairs of children selected randomly
from the p o p u l a t i o n . "
Robert Plomin and Denise Daniels ( 1 9 8 7 )
It would have to be concluded that upper-middle class brothers who at­
tended the same school and whose parents took them to the same plays,
sporting events, music lessons, and therapists and used similar childrearing practices on them would be found to be only slightly more similar
to each other in personality measures than to working-class or farm boys,
whose lives would be totally different.
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What we have here is developmental psychology's newest and one
of its biggest puzzles: Why are children in the same family so different?
Why do the shared genes and the shared family environment (the
family's social class, the parents' personalities, the neighborhood) have
so little discernible effect on children's personalities? Is it because even
though siblings share genes, each sibling has a very different combina­
tion of genes? Is it because the different siblings of a family experience
different environments (differing peer influences, birth orders, and so
forth)? Might sibling differences be triggered by brothers and sisters
comparing themselves with one another, perhaps unconsciously dis­
tancing themselves in an effort to create their own identities?
And why are identical twins so much alike in personality when
biological parent-child and sibling pairs are so little alike? Is it because
identical twins share not only the same individual genes but also the
same combinations of genes? Is it because they tend not only to be
treated alike by parents and friends but, being the same age, also to
experience the same cultural influences simultaneously? All these pos­
sibilities have been suggested. (Notice how in hindsight we begin to
transform into tomorrow's common sense a finding that has stunned
today's psychologists.)
Adoption studies show that, although the personalities of adopted
children do not much resemble those of their adoptive parents, adop­
tion has many positive effects. First, in their values and social atti­
tudes, adopted children are demonstrably influenced by their home
environments. Second, in the adoptive homes studied, child neglect
and abuse were virtually unheard of. So it is not surprising that nearly
all the adoptive children thrived. They scored higher than their biologi­
cal parents on intelligence tests, and many became happier and more
stable people than they surely would have in a neglectful environment.
Children need not resemble their adoptive parents to have benefited
greatly from adoption.
HOW MUCH C R E D I T (OR BLAME) DO PARENTS
DESERVE?
Parents typically feel enormous pride in their children's successes, and
guilt or shame over their failures. They beam when folks offer congrat­
ulations for the child who wins an award. They wonder where they
went wrong with the child who repeatedly is called into the principal's
office. Society reinforces such feelings: Believing that parents shape
their children as a potter molds clay, people readily praise parents for
their children's virtues and blame them for their children's vices.
This chapter has provided some confirmation of the power of par­
enting. The extremes provide the sharpest examples—the abused who
become abusive, the loved but firmly handled children who become
self-confident and socially competent. Given our readiness to praise or
blame, and to feel pride or shame, we do well also to remember a
simple principle: Within the normal range of environments, children's
genetically predisposed tendencies will assert themselves. Children
are not so easily molded as clay. Moreover, as our next chapter illus­
trates, lives also are formed by environmental influences beyond par­
ents' control—by peer influences, by chance events, by all sorts of life
experiences.
It may be scary to realize how risky is the business of having and
raising children. In procreation a woman and a man shuffle their gene
decks and deal a life-forming hand to their child-to-be, who thereafter
Studies of adopted families have provided
n e w clues to hereditary a n d e n v i r o n m e n ­
tal influences on development. H o w simi­
lar w o u l d y o u expect these children to be
to their adoptive parents a n d siblings? To
their biological parents a n d siblings?
C H A P T E R
3
T h e Developing Child
is subject to countless influences beyond their control. Remembering
that lives are formed by influences both under and beyond parents'
control, we had best be restrained in crediting parents for their
children's achievements and slower still to blame them for their
children's problems.
To say that genes and experience are both important is true, but an
oversimplification. More precisely, their effects are intertwined. Imag­
ine two babies, one genetically predisposed to be attractive, sociable,
and easygoing, the other less so. Assume further that the first baby
attracts more affectionate and stimulating care than the second, and so
develops into a warmer and more outgoing person. Moreover, as the
two children grow older, the more naturally outgoing one seeks out
activities and friends that encourage further social confidence.
What has caused their resulting personality difference? One cannot
truthfully say that their personalities are formed of x percent genes and
y percent experience, for the gene-experience effect is combined. In
fact, genes direct experience (Scarr & McCartney, 1983). As in our imagi­
nary example, one's genetically influenced traits may evoke significant
responses in others. Moreover, as we grow older we select environ­
ments well suited to our natures. In such ways, our genes influence the
experiences that shape us.
Developmental psychologists examine how we develop
physically, cognitively, and socially by studying the
human life span from conception to death.
quickly learn to discriminate the smell and sound of their
mothers; and they may even be capable of imitating sim­
ple gestures.
DEVELOPMENTAL I S S U E S
INFANCY AND C H I L D H O O D
Three issues pervade developmental psychology. First, to
what extent is each of our traits influenced by our genes
and to what extent by our experiences? Second, is devel­
opment a continuous process, or do we develop through
distinct stages? Third, are our lives characterized more by
stability of traits or by change?
Physical Development Within the brain, nerve cells form
before birth and, sculpted by experience, their intercon­
nections continue to multiply after birth. Infants' more
complex physical skills—sitting, standing, walking—
develop in a predictable sequence whose actual timing is a
function of individual maturation rate. Childhood—from
toddlerhood to the teen years—is a period of slow, steady
physical development.
PRENATAL D E V E L O P M E N T AND THE
NEWBORN
From Life Comes Life The life cycle begins as one sperm,
out of the some 300 million ejaculated, unites with an egg
to form a zygote. Two weeks later, the developing embryo
attaches to the uterine wall, and after 2 months is a recog­
nizably human fetus. Along with nutrients, teratogens
ingested hy the mother can reach the developing child
and possibly place it at risk.
The Competent Newborn With the aid of new methods
for studying babies, researchers have discovered that
newborns are surprisingly competent. They are born with
sensory equipment and reflexes that facilitate their inter­
acting with adults and securing nourishment; they
Cognitive Development Jean Piaget's observations of
children convinced him—and almost everyone else—that
the mind of the child is not that of a miniature adult. Pia­
get theorized that the mind develops by forming schemas
that help us assimilate our experiences and that must oc­
casionally be altered to accommodate new information. In
this way, children progress from the sensorimotor sim­
plicity of the infant to more complex stages of thinking.
For example, at about 8 months, an infant becomes aware
that things still exist even when out of sight. This sense of
object permanence coincides with the development of
stranger anxiety, which requires the ability to remember
who is familiar and who is not.
Piaget believed that preschool children are egocentric
85
86
PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
and unable to perform simple logical operations. How­
ever, he thought that at about age 7 children become ca­
pable of performing concrete operations, such as those
required to comprehend the principle of conservation.
Recent research indicates that young children are not so
incapable as Piaget believed. It seems that the cognitive
abilities that emerge at each stage are developing in a ru­
dimentary form in the previous stage.
Social Development Although the experiences of in­
fancy are not for long consciously remembered and their
effects may largely be reversed by later experiences, they
can nevertheless have a lasting influence on social devel­
opment.
A social response of infancy that can critically affect
later social development is attachment. Infants become
attached to their mothers and fathers not simply because
mothers and fathers gratify biological needs, but, more
important, because they are comfortable, familiar, and
responsive. If denied such care, both monkey and human
infants may become pathetically withdrawn, anxious, and
eventually abusive. Once an attachment forms, infants
who are separated from their caregiver will, for a time, be
distressed. Human infants who display secure attachment
to their mothers generally become socially competent pre­
schoolers.
accommodation Adapting one's current understandings
(schemas) to incorporate new information.
assimilation Interpreting one's new experience in terms
of one's existing schemas.
attachment An emotional tie with another person; evi­
denced in young children by their seeking closeness to the
caregiver and showing distress on separation.
basic trust According to Erik Erikson, a sense that the
world is predictable and trustworthy; said to be formed
during infancy by experiences with responsive caregivers.
chromosomes Threadlike structures made of DNA mole­
cules that contain the genes. A human cell has twentythree pairs of chromosomes, one member of each pair
coming from each parent.
cognition All the mental activities associated with think­
ing, knowing, and remembering.
concrete operational stage In Piaget's theory, the stage of
cognitive development (from about 7 to 12 years of age)
during which children acquire the mental operations that
enable them to think logically about concrete events.
conservation The principle (which Piaget believed to be a
part of concrete operational reasoning) that properties
such as mass, volume, and number remain the same de­
spite changes in the forms of objects.
As with cognitive abilities, the concept of self develops
gradually. At about age 18 months, infants will recognize
themselves in a mirror. By age 10, children's self-images
are quite stable, and are linked with their independence,
optimism, and sociability. Children who develop a posi­
tive self-image and a happy, self-reliant manner tend to
have been reared by parents who are neither permissive
nor authoritarian, but authoritative without depriving
their children of a sense of control over their own lives.
Decisions about child-rearing involve value judgments
about what traits in children should be encouraged.
R E F L E C T I O N S ON A DEVELOPMENTAL
I S S U E : GENES AND EXPERIENCE
Studies of the inheritance of temperament, along with
adoption studies and studies of twins, provide scientific
support for the idea that genes influence one's developing
personality. Developmentalists generally agree that genes
and environment, biological and social factors, direct our
life courses, and that their effects often intertwine, partly
because our genetic predispositions influence our forma­
tive experiences.
critical period A restricted time period during which an
organism must be exposed to certain influences or experi­
ences if proper development is to occur; in humans there
appear to be critical periods for the formation of attach­
ments and the learning of language.
DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) In cells, a complex mole­
cule containing genetic information.
egocentrism In Piaget's theory, the inability of the pre­
operational child to take another's point of view.
embryo The early developmental stage of an organism
after fertilization; in human development, the prenatal
stage from about 2 weeks to 2 months.
fetus The developing human organism from 9 weeks
after conception to birth.
fraternal twins Twins who develop from separate eggs
and sperm cells, thus ordinary brothers and sisters who
have shared the fetal environment.
genes The biochemical units of heredity that make up the
chromosomes; a segment of DNA capable of synthesizing
a protein.
identical twins Twins who develop from a single fertil­
ized egg that splits in two, creating two genetic replicas.
imprinting The process by which certain birds and mam-
CHAPTER
mals form attachments during a critical period very early
in life.
maturation Biological growth processes that enable or­
derly changes in behavior, relatively uninfluenced by ex­
perience.
nature-nurture issue The longstanding controversy over
the relative contributions of genes and experience to the
development of psychological traits and behaviors.
object permanence The awareness that things continue
to exist even when they are not perceived.
ovum The female reproductive cell, or egg, which after
fertilization develops into a new individual.
preoperational stage In Piaget's theory, the stage (from
about 2 to 7 years of age) during which a child learns to
use language but does not yet comprehend the mental
operations of concrete logic.
rooting reflex A baby's tendency, when touched on the
cheek, to open the mouth and search for the nipple.
schema A concept or framework that organizes and in­
terprets information.
Berger, K. (1986). The developing person through childhood
and adolescence (2nd ed.). New York: Worth.
A comprehensive, and readable textbook summarizing what we
know about infancy, childhood, and adolescence.
Chess, S., & Thomas, A. (1987). Know your child. New
York: Basic Books.
A respected wife-and-husband child psychiatrist team discuss
how effective child-rearing adjusts to the temperamental traits of
the individual child.
Flavell, J. H. (1985). Cognitive development (2nd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
3
T h e Developing Child
sensorimotor stage In Piaget's theory, the stage (from
birth to about 2 years of age) during which infants know
the world mostly in terms of their sensory impressions
and motor activities.
stranger anxiety The fear of strangers that infants com­
monly display beginning at about 8 months of age.
temperament A person's characteristic emotional reac­
tivity and intensity.
teratogens Agents, such as chemicals and viruses, that
can reach the embryo or fetus during prenatal develop­
ment and cause harm.
X sex chromosome The sex chromosome found in both
men and women. Females have two X chromosomes;
males have one. An X chromosome from each parent pro­
duces a female.
V sex chromosome The sex chromosome found only in
males. When it pairs with an X sex chromosome from the
mother, a male is produced.
zygote The fertilized egg; it enters a 2-week period of
rapid cell division and develops into an embryo.
A comprehensive overview of intellectual growth from infancy
through adolescence. Includes discussions of the development of
perception, memory, and language.
Park, R. D. (1981). Fathers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni­
versity Press.
A prominent developmental psychologist describes his own and
others' studies of fathering.
Scarr, S. (1986). Mother care/Other care. New York: Basic
Books.
An award-winning guide to child care by a leading developmen­
tal researcher.
CHAPTER
4
Adolescence and Adulthood
For much of this century, psychologists echoed William Wordsworth's
sentiment that "the child is father of the man." In this view, by the end
of childhood one's traits have nearly set, like clay. Although it remains
for life experiences to smooth the rough edges, the really pliable period
of development is over. The heritage of infancy and childhood will
reach decades into the future, for the characteristic features of one's
personality have been set.
So long as psychologists held this view, they focused their atten­
tion on the "critical" early years. Now, among a new generation of
developmental psychologists, the belief that no important changes in
personality occur after childhood is giving way to a growing sense that
development is lifelong. Yes, we are shaped during infancy and child­
hood, but the shaping continues during adolescence and well beyond.
At a 5-year high school reunion, friends may be surprised at the diver­
gence of their paths. A decade after college, two former soul mates
may have trouble communicating. As long as we live, we develop.
ADOLESCENCE
Adolescence extends from the beginnings of sexual maturity to the
achievement of independent adult status. In preindustrial societies,
the adolescent transition from childhood to adulthood typically lasts
but a few days or weeks (Baumeister & Tice, 1986). Adult status and
responsibilities are bestowed rather abruptly at the time of sexual mat­
uration, often marked by an initiation ceremony. In pre-twentiethcentury North America, young teenagers often labored as adults but
were expected to behave as obedient children until marriage (Kett,
1977). Not until this century, when biological maturity began occurring
earlier (because of improved nutrition) and adult labor was largely
postponed until after compulsory schooling, did people begin to think
of adolescence as a distinct period of life.
What are the teen years like? To St. Augustine, these years were a
time of fiery passions involving
the hot imagination of puberty. . . . Both love and lust boiled within me
and swept my youthful immaturity over the precipice.
In Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the teenage years were, rather,
that blissful time when childhood is just coming to an end, and out of that
vast circle, happy and gay, a path takes shape.
N o t until this century were y o u n g teen­
agers routinely spared the d e m a n d s of
adult labor. Adolescents were expected to
In her diary, written as she and her family hid from the Nazis, teenager
Anne Frank observed,
work as soon as they were physically
able.
90
PART
2
Development over the Life Span
My treatment varies so much. One day Anne is so sensible and is allowed
to know everything; and the next day I hear that Anne is just a silly little
goat who doesn't know anything at all and imagines that she's learned a
wonderful lot from books. . . . Oh, so many things bubble up inside me as
I lie in bed, having to put up with people I'm fed up with, who always
misinterpret my intentions.
To G. Stanley Hall (1904), the first American psychologist to de­
scribe adolescence, it was a period of "storm and stress"—of emotional
turbulence caused by the tension between biological maturity and
emotional and economic dependence. Indeed, after age 30, many peo­
ple look back on their teenage years as a time they would not like to
relive (Macfarlane, 1964). They recall those years as a period when the
social approval of peers was imperative, pressures for achievement
,.
,
<• i .
.•
•
- n
i
were nerve-racking, one s sense of direction in life was in flux, and
alienation from parents was deepest.
Other psychologists have noted that for many, adolescence is often
as Tolstoy described it—a time of vitality without the cares of adult­
hood, a time of congenial family relationships punctuated by only oc­
casional tensions, a time of rewarding friendships, a time of height­
ened idealism and a growing sense of life's exciting possibilities
(Coleman, 1980). These psychologists would not be surprised that nine
out of ten high school seniors agreed with the statement, "On the
whole, I'm satisfied with myself" (Public Opinion, 1987a).
Despite such conflicting observations, we can make some general
statements about the most common physical, cognitive, and social
changes of the adolescent years.
PHYSICAL
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choices that s o m e d a y you will recollect
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?
DEVELOPMENT
Adolescence begins at puberty, the time of rapid growth and sexual
maturation. Puberty commences with a surge of hormones, which trig­
gers a 2-year period of rapid development that usually begins in girls at
about age 11 and in boys at about age 13. Boys grow as much as 5
inches a year, compared with about 3 inches for girls—propelling the
average male, for the first time in his life, to become noticeably taller
than the average female (Figure 4 - 1 ) . During this growth spurt, the
reproductive organs, or primary sex characteristics, develop dramati­
cally. So do the secondary sex characteristics, the nonreproductive
traits of females and males, such as enlarged breasts and hips in girls,
facial hair and a deepened voice in boys, pubic and underarm hair in
both sexes (Figure 4 - 2 ) .
The landmarks of puberty are the first ejaculation in boys, which
usually occurs by about age 14, and the first menstrual period in girls,
by about age 13. (These events do not necessarily signify fertility; it
may be another year or more before ejaculations contain sufficient live
sperm and the menstrual cycle includes ovulation [Tanner, 1978].)
The first menstrual period, called menarche (meh-NAR-key), is an
especially memorable event, one that is recalled by nearly all adult
women. Most recall it with a mixture of feelings—pride, excitement,
embarrassment, and apprehension (Greif & Ulman, 1982; Woods &
others, 1983). Girls who are well prepared for menarche are the most
likely to experience it as a positive life transition. And a transition it is:
Regardless of the age at which their menarche occurs, shortly after­
ward most girls increasingly see and present themselves as different
from boys and function more independently of their parents (Golub,
1983).
Figure 4 - 1
T h r o u g h o u t childhood, boys
a n d girls are similar in height. At puberty,
girls surge ahead briefly, but then boys
overtake them at a b o u t a g e 14. (From
Tanner, 1978.)
C H A P T E R
4
Figure 4 - 2
As in the earlier life stages, the sequence of physical changes (for
example, breast buds before visible pubic hair before menarche) is far
more predictable than their timing. Some girls start their growth spurt
at 9, some boys as late as age 16. Such variations have little effect on
height at maturity. However, they may have psychological conse­
quences. Studies performed in the 1950s by Mary Cover Jones and her
colleagues revealed that for boys early maturation pays dividends.
Early-maturing boys, being stronger and more athletic during their
early teen years and seemingly less childlike, tend to be more popular,
self-assured, and independent, and some of their greater sociability
may continue into early adulthood.
Adolescence and Adulthood
Puberty c o m m e n c e s with a
surge of hormones that trigger a variety
of physical c h a n g e s .
For girls, early maturation is less advantageous (Petersen, 1987).
The 11-year-old who towers over her classmates and becomes sexually
attractive before her peers do may temporarily suffer embarrassment
and be the object of teasing. But as her peers catch up, in junior and
senior high school, her postpubertal experience helps her to enjoy
greater prestige and self-confidence. In some situations—dance train­
ing, for example—girls are more successful if they mature late (latematuring girls tend to have physical characteristics, such as leanness,
preferred by dance masters [Brooks-Gunn, 1986]). This illustrates what
makes for smooth adjustment: It's not only when we mature that
counts, but also how people around us react to our physical develop­
ment. This exemplifies a recurring theme: Heredity and environment
interact. In this case, how the environment responds to the youngster
depends on the timing of maturation, as programmed by heredity.
COGNITIVE D E V E L O P A A E N T
Adolescents' developing ability to reason allows a new level of social
awareness and moral judgment. As young teenagers become capable
of thinking about their own thinking, and thinking about what other
people are thinking, they become prone to imagining what other peo­
ple are thinking about them. As their cognitive abilities continue to
grow, many adolescents begin to think about what is ideally possible
and become quite critical of their society, their parents, and even their
own shortcomings.
Girls often begin their " a s c e n t " into p u ­
berty earlier than boys. T h i s can lead to
social embarrassment for early a n d late
bloomers alike.
92
PART
2
Development over the Life Span
Formal Operations According to Piaget, preadolescents are re­
stricted to reasoning about the concrete, but adolescents become capa­
ble of thinking logically about abstract propositions. They can reason
hypothetically and deduce consequences: if this, then that. Unlike chil­
dren, adolescents can deduce that when an investigator hides a poker
chip and says, "Either this chip is green or it is not green," the state­
ment logically must be true (Osherson & Markman, 1974-1975). These
developing reasoning skills define Piaget's final stage of cognitive
growth, formal operations.
Formal operations are the summit of intellectual development.
Early adolescents may already have enough command of formal opera­
tions to learn algebra. But their ability to reason systematically, as a
scientist might in testing hypotheses and deducing conclusions, awaits
the full development of their ability for formal reasoning (Inhelder &
Piaget, 1958).
Piaget's critics have raised a number of objections to his depiction
of formal operational intelligence. They maintain that the rudiments of
logic can begin earlier than Piaget believed. Given a simple problem
such as " I f John is in school, then Mary is in school. John is in school.
What can you say about Mary?," many 7-year-olds have no trouble
answering correctly (Patrick Suppes, cited by Ennis, 1982).
Another criticism, which Piaget (1972) acknowledged, is that he
overestimated the number of people who attain the level of formal
logic. Many adolescents and adults seldom achieve formal operational
reasoning, particularly if they are uneducated in the logic of science
and mathematics. Consider this conversation between researcher Syl­
via Scribner (1977) and an illiterate Kpelle farmer in a Liberian village:
" T h e principal novelty of this period is the
capacity to reason in terms of verbally
stated hypotheses and no longer merely
in terms of concrete objects and their
manipulation."
Jean Piaget (1972)
More on logical thinking in Chapter 11,
Thinking and L a n g u a g e .
Sylvia Scribner: All Kpelle men are rice farmers. Mr. Smith is not a rice farmer.
Is he a Kpelle man?
Kpelle farmer: I don't know the man. I have not laid eyes on the man myself.
Kpelle villagers who had had formal schooling could answer Scribner
logically.
Nevertheless, it seems fair to conclude that the mind usually be­
comes capable of such reasoning in adolescence. One of the ways this
new cognitive power manifests itself most frequently is in adolescents'
pondering and debating such abstract topics as human nature, good
and evil, truth and justice. Adolescents' logical thinking enables them
to detect logical inconsistencies in others' reasoning, which can lead to
heated debates with parents (Peterson & others, 1986). As Roger
Brown (1965, p. 233) observed,
As an adolescent one is amazed at adults who do not seem to realize the
logical implications of their own ideas and who, still more unaccountably,
do not make their actions consistent with their beliefs. The adolescent
vows that he will never get to be like that; he will fight off whatever it is
that clouds the adult intelligence. And suddenly he is ten years older,
uncertain about everything and thoroughly compromised, trying to recall
what it was he vowed to preserve.
Moral Thinking A crucial task of childhood is learning right from
wrong. But how do our notions of right and wrong develop?
Following Piaget's (1932) contention that children's moral develop­
ment is tied to their cognitive development, Lawrence Kohlberg (1981,
1984) proposed that moral thought also develops through stages. To
study people's moral thinking, Kohlberg (1981, p. 12) posed stories to
children, adolescents, and adults in which the characters face a moral
dilemma. Ponder for a moment his best known dilemma:
The adolescent's g r o w i n g ability to think
logically about abstract propositions illus­
trates Piaget's final stage of cognitive
growth, formal operations.
C H A P T E R
4
Adolescence and A d u l t h o o d
93
In Europe, a woman was near death from a very bad disease, a special
kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save
her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently
discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charg­
ing ten times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $200 for the radium
and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's hus­
band, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he
could get together only about $1,000, which was half of what it cost. He
told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper
or let him pay later. But the druggist said, "No, I discovered the drug and
I'm going to make money from it." Heinz got desperate and broke into the
man's store to steal the drug for his wife.
What do you think: Should Heinz have stolen the drug? Why was what
he did right or wrong? Kohlberg would not have been interested in
whether you judged Heinz's behavior as right or wrong—either an­
swer could be justified—but rather in the reasoning process by which
you arrived at your judgment. We all are moral philosophers, Kohlberg
proposed, and our moral reasoning helps guide our judgments and
behavior (Berkowitz & others, 1986; Candee & Kohlberg, 1987).
On the basis of his research, Kohlberg argued that as we develop
intellectually we pass through as many as six stages of moral reasoning
(see Table 4 - 1 ) . These six stages are divided into three basic levels:
Table 4-1
KOHLBERC'S STAGES OF MORAL DEVELOPMENT
Stage description
Examples of moral reasoning
in support of Heinz's stealing
Examples of moral reasoning
against Heinz's stealing
Preconventional morality: morality of self-interest
1. Avoids punishment
"If you let your wife die, you will get
in trouble."
"You shouldn't steal the drug because you'
get caught and sent to jail if you do."
2. Gains concrete
rewards
"If you steal the drug, your wife will live,
"He may not get much of a jail term if he
steals the drug, but his wife will probably
die before he gets out."
Conventional morality: morality of law and social convention
Gains approval/
avoids
disapproval
"If you steal the drug, your wife will live
and you'll be a hero."
"It isn't just the druggist who will think
you're a criminal, everyone else will, too."
Does duty to
society/avoids
dishonor or guilt
"If you have any sense of honor, you won't
let your wife die because you're afraid to
do the only thing that will save her."
"You'll always feel guilty for your dishonesty
and lawbreaking."
Postconventional morality: morality of abstract principles
5. Affirms agreedupon rights
"His obligation to save his wife's life must
take precedence. The value of human life is
logically prior to the value of property."
"It is so hard for people to live together
unless there are some laws governing
their actions."
6. Affirms own
ethical
principles
"If you don't steal the drug, you would
have lived up to the outside rule of the law
but you wouldn't have lived up to your
own standards of conscience."
"If you steal the drug, you won't be blamed
by other people but you'll condemn your­
self because you won't have lived up to your
own conscience and standards of honesty."
Source: Second a n d third columns adapted from The philosophy of moral development: Essays on moral development (Vol. I) b y L. Kohlberg, 1 9 8 4 ,
San Francisco: Harper & R o w .
94
PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
preconventional, conventional, and postconventional. Before age 9,
most children have a "preconventional morality" of self-interest: One
obeys to avoid punishment (Stage 1) or to gain concrete rewards
(Stage 2). By early adolescence, morality usually evolves to a more
"conventional morality" that upholds laws and conventions simply
because they are the laws and conventions. Being able to take others'
perspectives, adolescents may approve actions that will gain social
approval (Stage 3) or that will help maintain the social order (Stage 4).
Those who become sophisticated in the abstract reasoning of formal
operational thought may come to a "postconventional morality" that
affirms people's socially agreed-upon rights (Stage 5) or that follows
what their individual conscience perceives as universal ethical princi­
ples that may sometimes conflict with society's rules (Stage 6).
Kohlberg's controversial claim was that these six stages form a
moral ladder that extends from the immature, preconventional moral­
ity typical of the 7-year-old to, at its top rung, a recognition of what the
person perceives to be fundamental ethical principles. As with all stage
theories, the sequence is assumed to be unvarying. People begin at the
bottom rung, and ascend to varying heights.
Kohlberg's theory of moral development is provocative. It spells
out some of the ways people determine right from wrong. It suggests
why people who operate from different levels of moral thinking often
clash in their political and social judgments. And it implies a strategy
for moral education. In the tradition of Piaget, Kohlberg believes that
moral thinking matures as children's minds actively confront moral
challenges. Moral education is therefore consciousness-raising—
raising a person's moral consciousness to a higher stage through dia­
logue concerning rules and moral issues.
Provocative, yes. But is the theory valid? Does it accurately and
helpfully describe moral development? Kohlberg's detractors offer two
criticisms. The first emphasizes that, though our moral reasoning may
largely determine our moral talk, it is but one of several influences on
our actions. Morality, some critics say, involves what you do as well as
what you think, and what we do is powerfully influenced by the social
situation as well as by our inner attitudes. Many of the guards in the
Nazi concentration camps were rather ordinary people who were cor­
rupted by a powerfully evil system (Arendt, 1963). Given the imperfect
link between moral reasoning and moral action, say the critics, we
should also concentrate on instructing children how to act morally in
given situations and on setting a good example ourselves (Blasi, 1980;
Gibbs & Schnell, 1985).
T h e relationships between attitudes a n d
a c t i o n s
a
r
e
explored in C h a p t e r 19, Soci
influence.
T h o s e w h o conform to society's rules
often do not take kindly to those w h o
seek to c h a n g e those rules. Kohlberg c o n ­
tends that S t a g e 6 moral thinking, e m ­
bodied here by Martin Luther K i n g , Jr.,
m a y be rejected by those w h o , not c o m ­
prehending, feel threatened by it.
C H A P T E R
The second criticism is that Kohlberg's theory has a Western cul­
tural bias. Children in various cultures do seem to progress sequen­
tially through the first three or four of Kohlberg's stages (Edwards,
1981, 1982; Snarey, 1985, 1987). However, the postconventional stages
are most frequently found in educated, middle-class people in coun­
tries, such as the United States, Canada, Britain, and others that value
individualism. The schema may therefore be biased against the moral
reasoning of those in communal societies such as China and Papua
New Guinea. Moreover, who is to say that the nonconformity of what
Kohlberg calls the "highest" and most "mature" postconventional
level is indeed morally preferable?
Because Kohlberg's formative studies involved male subjects only,
Carol Gilligan (1982) offered another critique: Stage 6 is morality from a
male perspective. For women, she argues, moral maturity is less an
impersonal morality of abstract ethical principles and more a morality
of responsible social relationships. Thus, measured by Kohlberg's
yardstick, women's moral differences are seen as moral deficits. Actu­
ally, contends Gilligan (1982, p. 173), women's concern for social re­
sponsibilities is a moral strength that complements men's concern with
abstract ethics: "In the different voice of women lies the truth of an
ethic of care."
The accumulating evidence has provided little direct support for
Gilligan's views (Blake & Cohen, 1985; Friedman & others, 1987; Rothbart & others, 1986; Thoma, 1986; Walker, 1986). Nevertheless, polls
continue to find that women are more likely than men to favor the
Democratic party, which generally promotes programs for the poor
and disadvantaged. Might an "ethic of care" also help explain why
women are more likely than men to select helping professions such as
child care and social work, and why daughters rather than sons so
often take primary responsibility for their elderly parents (Troll, 1987)?
Kohlberg's critics agree that moral reasoning is linked with cogni­
tive development. Nevertheless, they caution that moral reasoning is
but one determinant of moral action and that Kohlberg's postconven­
tional moral stages may be those of individualists in a Western culture.
SOCIAL
4
Adolescence and Adulthood
W h a t w o u l d happen to society if every­
one adopted S t a g e 6 moral reasoning a n d
acted according to their o w n perception
of universal ethical principles, with little
regard for society's conventions?
" I t is obvious that the values of w o m e n
differ very often from the values which
have been m a d e by the other s e x . "
V i r g i n i a Woolf,
A
Room
of One's
Own,
1929
"This might not be ethical.
problem
for
Is that a
anybody?"
DEVELOPMENT
Theorist Erik Erikson (1963) contended that each stage of life has its
own "psychosocial" task. As we saw in Chapter 3 (Table 3 - 2 , page 74),
young children deal with issues of trust, then autonomy, then initiative.
Later, between the ages of 7 and 11, they develop industry, the sense
that they are competent and productive human beings. For adoles­
cents, the task is to synthesize their past, their present, and their future
possibilities into a clear sense of self. Erikson calls this attempt to estab­
lish a sense of self the adolescent's search for identity.
Forming an Identity "Who am I as an individual? What do I want to
do with my life? What values should I live by? What do I believe in?"
According to Erikson, arriving at answers that provide a stable and
consistent identity is essential to the adolescent's finding a meaningful
place in society.
To gain this sense of identity, adolescents usually try out different
"selves" in different situations—perhaps acting out one self at home,
another with friends, and still another at school and work. If two of
these situations overlap—as when a teenager brings home friends with
whom he is Joe Cool—the discomfort can be considerable. The teen
asks, "Which self should I be? Which is the real m e ? " Often, this role
" I am b e c o m i n g still more independent of
my parents; y o u n g as I a m , I face life with
more c o u r a g e than M u m m y ; m y feeling
for justice is immovable, and truer than
hers. I k n o w w h a t I want, I have a g o a l ,
an opinion, I have a religion, a n d love.
Let me be myself a n d then I am satisfied.
I k n o w that I'm a w o m a n , a w o m a n with
inward strength a n d plenty of c o u r a g e . "
A n n e Frank,
Diary of a
Young Girl,
1947
95
96
PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
confusion gets resolved by the gradual forging of a self-definition that
unifies the various selves into a consistent and comfortable sense of
who one is—an identity.
But not always. Erikson believes that some adolescents form their
identity early, simply by taking on their parents' values and expecta­
tions. Others may form a negative identity, one that defines itself in
opposition to parents and society, complete perhaps with shaved head
or multicolored, spiked hair. Still others never quite seem to find them­
selves or to develop strong commitments. For most, the struggle for
identity continues throughout the teen years and reappears at turning
points during adult life.
The late teen years, when many people begin attending college or
working full-time, provide new opportunities for trying out possible
roles. As college seniors, many students have achieved a clearer iden­
tity than they had as first-year students (Waterman & others, 1974).
This identity tends to incorporate a more positive self-concept than
existed before. In several nationwide studies, researchers have given
young Americans tests of self-esteem (sample item: "I am able to do
things as well as most other people"). Between ages 13 and 23, the
sense of self usually becomes more positive (O'Malley & Bachman,
1983). A clearer, more self-affirming identity is forming.
During the teen years identity also becomes more personalized.
Daniel Hart (1988) asked youth of various ages to imagine a machine
that would copy either (a) what you think and feel, (b) your exact
appearance, or (c) your relationships with friends and family. Asked
"Which of these persons is closest to being you?," three-fourths of
seventh graders chose the clone with the same social network; threefourths of ninth graders chose the clone with their individual thoughts
and feelings.
Erikson contends that the adolescent identity stage is followed in
young adulthood by a developing capacity for intimacy, the ability to
form emotionally close relationships. But to Carol Gilligan (1982), the
"normal" struggle to create one's separate identity characterizes indi­
vidualistic males more than relationship-oriented females. Gilligan be­
lieves that females are less concerned than males with viewing them­
selves as separate individuals, and more concerned with intimate
relationships. Thus females are less likely to exhibit Erikson's identitybefore-intimacy sequence (Kahn & others, 1985).
By trying out different roles, adolescents
try out different " s e l v e s . " A l t h o u g h some
of their roles are uncomfortable for both
the adolescents a n d their parents, most
teenagers eventually forge a consistent
a n d comfortable identity.
C H A P T E R
4
Adolescence and Adulthood
Relationships with Parents and Peers Are adolescents indeed pre­
occupied with separating themselves from their parents in order to
form their own identities? Is adolescence a time of undeclared war
between restrictive parents and their rebellious, independence-seek­
ing, identity-craving offspring? In Western cultures, adolescence is
typically a time of growing peer influence and diminishing parental
influence, especially on matters of personal taste and life-style. For
example, the best predictor of whether a high school student smokes
marijuana is simply how many of the student's friends smoke it (Oetting & Beauvais, 1987). Another predictor is working long hours at a
job; high school students who do so are more likely to use drugs,
perhaps because they spend more time with older co-workers who use
drugs; perhaps, too, the need for cash to purchase drugs motivates
them to work long hours (Bachman, 1987). Those who continue to live
with their parents after high school show little change in drug use,
while those who move in with peers become more likely to use drugs
(Bachman & others, 1984). As peer influences grow, parental influ­
ences diminish.
Does this mean that parents and their adolescents are estranged?
For a small minority, it does. But for most, disagreement at the level of
bickering is not destructive. "We usually get along but . . . ," adoles­
cents often report (Steinberg, 1987). Positive relations with parents ac­
tually support positive peer relations. High school girls who have the
most affectionate relationships with their mothers tend also to enjoy
the most intimate friendships with girlfriends (Gold & Yanof, 1985).
Moreover, in most families the generation gap is easily bridged
because it is rather narrow. In response to a 1977 Gallup poll that asked
adolescents how they got along with their parents, 56 percent—the
"teen angels," we might call them—said they got along with them
"very well," 41 percent indicated "fairly well," and only 2 percent
indicated they got along "not at all well." Indeed, researchers have
been surprised at how closely most adolescents reflect the social, politi­
cal, and religious views of their parents (Gallatin, 1980). As often as
not, what "generation gaps" there were on such issues merely in­
volved differences in the strength with which adolescents and their
parents held their shared opinions and values (Figure 4 - 3 ) .
M o s t teenagers say they generally have a
g o o d relationship with their parents.
" W h e n I was a boy of 14 my father was
so ignorant I could hardly stand to have
the old man around. But when I got to
be 2 1 , I was astonished at how much he
had learnt in seven years."
Mark Twain, 1 8 3 5 - 1 9 1 0
Figure 4 - 3
H i g h school seniors' atti­
tudes appear to be in m u c h closer agree­
ment with their parents' than m a n y s u p ­
pose. A g r e e m e n t is greater, however, on
basic values than on life-style choices.
(From B a c h m a n & others, 1987.)
98
PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
A D U L T H O O D AND AGING
Until recently, adulthood, especially the center-of-life years between
adolescence and old age, was commonly viewed as one long plateau.
No longer. As we will see, those who have closely followed the unfold­
ing of people's adult lives have been impressed by the degree to which
development continues. Physically, cognitively, and especially so­
cially, people at age 50 are quite different from their 25-year-old selves.
Recognizing that adults do change, developmental theorists have
proposed various stages of adult development, complete with transi­
tion periods. When people become independent of their parents and
assume work roles, a transition from adolescence to early adulthood oc­
curs—at about age 20, give or take a few years depending on the cul­
ture and the individual. This period extends to about age 40, at which
time a transition to middle adulthood is said to occur. Within the later
adult years, many developmentalists distinguish the "young-old"
postretirement years (65 to 75) from the "old-old" years (after 75) of
more rapid physical decline.
The labeling of life's phases is a convenient way to organize the
adult years. But the labels are arbitrary, and the transition points are
fuzzy. Moreover, by itself, age causes nothing. People do not get wiser
with age; they get wiser with experience. People do not die because of
old age; they die of the physical deterioration that accompanies aging.
For that matter, during the adult years, age only modestly predicts
people's traits. If you know only that Maria is a 1-year-old and Mere­
dith is a 10-year-old, you could say a great deal about each. Not so with
adults who differ similarly in age. The boss may be 30 or 60; the mara­
thon runner may be 20 or 50; the reader of this book may be a teenager
or a grandparent. Likewise, to be 19 can mean that one is a parent who
supports young children or a student who still gets an allowance.
The unpredictability of adult lives reflects the increasing impor­
tance of individual experiences. During the first 2 years of life, biologi­
cal maturation narrowly restricts our course. The infant who is
strapped on a cradleboard and the one who moves freely will both
walk and talk at about the same age. But as the years pass, we sail a
widening channel, allowing the winds of experience to diverge our
courses more and more.
Individual life experiences make it much more difficult to general­
ize about adulthood than about life's early years. Yet our life courses
are in some ways similar. Our bodies, our minds, and our relationships
undergo changes in common with childhood friends who in other
ways now may seem very different.
PHYSICAL
DEVELOPMENT
Although few of us are aware of it at the time, our physical abilities
peak in early adulthood. Muscular strength, reaction time, sensory
acuity, and cardiac output all crest by the mid-twenties. Like the de­
clining daylight after the summer solstice, the decline in physical
prowess begins imperceptibly. Athletes are often the first to notice.
World-class sprinters and swimmers generally peak in their teens or
early twenties, with women (who mature earlier) peaking earlier than
men. But most people—especially those whose daily lives do not re­
quire peak physical performance—hardly perceive the early signs of
decline.
" I a m still l e a r n i n g . "
M i c h e l a n g e l o ' s motto, 1 5 6 0 , at a g e 85
C H A P T E R
4
Adolescence and Adulthood
Physical Changes in Middle Adulthood In middle adulthood,
physical decline gradually accelerates (Figure 4 - 4 ) , but even dimin­
ished vigor is sufficient for normal activities. Moreover, during early
and middle adulthood a person's health and exercise habits have more
to say about physical vigor than does aging. Many of today's physically
fit 50-year-olds can run several miles with ease, while sedentary 25year-olds find themselves huffing and puffing on a jog around the
block.
The physical changes of adult life can trigger psychological re­
sponses, which vary depending on how one views growing older. In
some Eastern cultures where respect and power come with age, out­
ward signs of one's advancing years are generally accepted, even wel­
comed. In Western cultures where the perceived ideal is youthful,
smooth skin and a slim torso, the wrinkles and bulges that frequently
accompany middle age can be a threat to self-esteem—something to
try to avoid. But nature will not be denied; inevitably the lines appear,
the youthful form begins to change its shape.
For women, the most definite biological change related to aging is
menopause, the cessation of the menstrual cycle, usually beginning
within a few years of age 50. Menopause is caused by a reduction in the
hormone estrogen and is sometimes accompanied by physical symp­
toms such as hot flashes and profuse perspiring. Some women also
experience periods of anxiety, emotional instability, or depression. But
like the stereotype of adolescent storm and stress, the image of meno­
pausal upheaval has given way to a recognition that menopause usu­
ally does not create significant psychological problems for women, nor
does it greatly diminish sexual appetite or appeal (Newman, 1982).
What determines the emotional impact of menopause is the wom­
an's attitude toward it. Does she see menopause as a sign that she is
losing her femininity and sexual attractiveness and beginning to grow
old? Or does she look on it as liberation from contraceptives, menstrual
periods, fears of pregnancy, and the demands of children? To ascertain
women's attitudes toward menopause, Bernice Neugarten and her col­
leagues (1963) did what, amazingly, no one had bothered to do: They
asked questions of women, including those whose experience of men­
opause had not led them to seek treatment. When asked, for example,
whether it is true that after menopause "women generally feel better
than they have for years," only one-fourth of the premenopausal
women under age 45 guessed yes; of the older women who had experi­
enced menopause, two-thirds said yes. As one woman said, "I can
remember my mother saying that after her menopause she really got
her vigor, and I can say the same thing myself." Social psychologist
Jacqueline Goodchilds (1987) quips: " I f the truth were known, we'd
have to diagnose [older women] as having P.M.F.—Post-Menstrual
Freedom."
Men experience no equivalent to the menopause—no cessation of
fertility, no sharp drop in sex hormones. But they do experience a
gradual decline in sperm count and testosterone level. Some may also
experience psychological distress related to their perception of de­
creased virility and declining physical capacities.
Physical Changes in Later Life Is old age "more to be feared than
death" (Juvenal, Satires)? Or is life "most delightful when it is on the
downward slope" (Seneca, Epistulae ad Lucilium)? What have we to
look forward to? What is it like to be old? To gauge your own attitudes,
take the following true/false quiz:
D u r i n g middle adulthood, physical vigor
depends more on exercise than on a g e .
Kareem A b d u l - J a b b a r (left), w h o turned
40 in 1 9 8 7 , remains in great shape.
99
PART
100
2
Development over the Life S p a n
1.
By 2030, 1 in 9 Americans will be 65 or older (see below).
2.
The average life expectancy for a person 65 years old is 10
more years (see page 101).
3.
During old age there usually occurs a substantial loss of neu­
rons in the brain (see page 101).
4.
Older people become more susceptible to short-term illnesses
(see below).
5.
Approximately one-fourth of people age 65 and older live in
institutions (nursing homes, hospitals, and homes for the
aged) (see page 101).
6.
If they live long enough—-to be 90 or more—most elderly
people eventually become senile (see page 101).
7.
Recognition memory—the ability to identify things previ­
ously experienced—declines with age (see page 102).
8.
Life satisfaction peaks in one's fifties and then gradually de­
clines after age 65 (see page 109).
9.
Among the elderly, there are twice as many widows than
widowers (see page 110).
10.
Many older people are preoccupied with a fear of death (see
page 111).
Life Expectancy The above statements—all false—are among the
myths about aging that have been exploded by current research on
North America's most rapidly growing population group. In 1900,
those 65 and older accounted for 1 in 25 Americans; by 1987, thanks
partly to strides in combating childhood diseases, the proportion in­
creased to 1 in 8. By 2030, when living members of the baby-boom
generation born in the 1950s and early 1960s will all have reached 65,
the 65 and over group will include 1 in 5 Americans. In the Third
World, the elderly population is rising even faster—and will have dou­
bled between 1980 and 2000. The number of childless adults also is
rising. Consider China, where there were 5 children per elderly person
in 1955. In 2040, there will be but 2 children per elderly person (Hugo,
1987). Clearly, countries that depend on children to look after elderly
persons are destined for major social changes.
Sensory Abilities As we have seen, physical decline begins in early
adulthood, but it is usually not until later in life that people become
acutely aware of it. As visual acuity diminishes and the speed of one's
adaptation to changes in light level slows, older people tend to have
more accidents. Most stairway falls taken by older persons occur on the
top step, precisely where the person typically descends from a
window-lit hallway into the darker stairwell (Fozard & Popkin, 1978).
Muscle strength, hearing, reaction time, and stamina also diminish
noticeably. Thus, in later life it may seem as if the stairs are getting
steeper, the newspaper print smaller, and people are mumbling more
than they used to.
Health Despite these signs of aging, the "young-old," especially
those in good health with a positive attitude, continue to enjoy the
vitality to maintain an active life. Indeed, although older people are
more subject to long-term ailments, such as arthritis, they less often
suffer short-term ailments, such as flu (Palmore, 1981). The similar
good health in the preretirement years helps explain why older work­
ers have lower absenteeism than do young workers (Rhodes, 1983).
C H A P T E R
Although at birth the average American has a 75-year life expect­
ancy, current statistics show that those who survive to age 65 can ex­
pect to live until they are 82—or even longer if they are women, had
parents who lived past 80, and maintain a healthy way of life, free of
cigarettes and with regular exercise. One survey revealed that most
elderly people think that the majority of their peers have some sort of
serious health problem—although when asked about their own health
fewer than one in four report that they have such a problem (National
Council on the Aging, 1976). So it should not surprise us that only 5
percent of all those over 65 are residing in institutions such as nursing
homes.
Bear in mind, too, that age-linked changes need not be age-deter­
mined. For example, blood pressure and blood cholesterol are affected
not so much by age per se as by age-linked changes in nutrition and
exercise, and by the accumulated effects of smoking and drinking
(Rowe & Kahn, 1987). To the extent that consumption and activity
patterns rather than age itself determine "usual aging," we have it
within our power to age in good health.
However, aging does slow neural processes, and with age there is
a small, gradual loss of brain cells, contributing to a 5 percent or so
reduction of brain weight by age 80. But the proliferation of neural
connections, especially in people who remain active, helps compensate
for the cell loss (Coleman & Flood, 1986). Perhaps this helps explain
the common finding that adults who remain active—physically, sexu­
ally, and mentally—tend to retain more of their functional capacity for
such activities in later years (Jarvik, 1975; Pfeiffer, 1977). In general,
"use it or lose it" appears to be sound advice. We are more likely to rust
from disuse than wear out from overuse.
A small number of adults do, however, suffer a tragic loss of brain
cells. A series of small strokes, a brain tumor, or alcoholism can result
in progressive brain damage causing senility. The most feared of all
brain diseases, Alzheimer's disease, strikes 10 percent of the aging by
age 75, and 20 percent of those 85 and older (Heckler, 1985). Some 2
million Americans are afflicted at a cost of some $40 billion a year, and
the numbers are expected to double by the year 2000 as the population
ages (Holden, 1987c).
Alzheimer's destroys even the brightest of minds. Memory, and
eventually reasoning and language, gradually deteriorate. As the dis­
ease runs its course, after some 3 to 20 years, the patient may become
disoriented, then incontinent, and progressively lose mental function—
a sort of living death preceding actual death.
In its early stages, Alzheimer's disease is easily mistaken for men­
tal laziness. Robert Sayre (1979) recalls his father shouting at his af­
flicted mother to "think harder" when she could not remember where
she had put something, while his mother, confused, embarrassed, on
the verge of tears, randomly searched the house. Caregiving family
members of increasingly confused and helpless sufferers can them­
selves easily become Alzheimer's exasperated and exhausted hidden
victims.
We now know that underlying the disease is a deterioration in
neurons that produce the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, and that
drugs that block the normal activity of this neurotransmitter produce
Alzheimer-like symptoms (Weingartner, 1986). Investigators have also
located on the twenty-first chromosome the genetic defect that causes
one form of Alzheimer's. With continuing advances in our understand­
ing of the genetics, brain chemistry, and neural underpinnings of Alz­
heimer's, hopes for an eventual treatment grow.
4
Adolescence and Adulthood
M o s t older people are in g o o d e n o u g h
health to maintain an active life. A n d the
more active they remain, the more vigor
they retain.
101
102
PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
One of the most controversial questions in the study of human devel­
opment is whether cognitive abilities such as memory, creativity, and
intelligence follow a similar course of gradually accelerating decline
during adulthood. Employers may wonder what they should do with
their older workers. Retire them—or capitalize on their experience?
Voters may wonder if a 75-year-old person retains the agility of mind,
the flexibility of thought, and the judgment required to lead a nation.
Aging and M e m o r y
We do know that early adulthood provides the
peak years for some types of learning and remembering (Craik, 1977).
For example, David Schonfield and Betty-Anne Robertson (1966) asked
adults of various ages to learn a list of twenty-four words. Some were
then asked, without being given any clues, to recall as many words as
they could from the list. As Figure 4 - 5 indicates, younger adults had
better recall—a finding that parallels the greater ease with which
younger adults recall new names and process complicated information
(Zacks & Hasher, 1988). Others, given multiple-choice questions that
asked them simply to recognize which words they had seen, exhibited
no memory decline with age. So it seems that while our ability to recall
new learning gradually declines during adulthood, our ability to recog­
nize what we have learned remains strong. Moreover, part of the recall
difficulty that the elderly often complain of is attributable to normal
forgetting. When Grandpa forgets where he put his car keys, he and
we are more likely to blame his age than when his 20-year-old grand­
daughter mislays hers.
The proficiency of adults in retaining newly acquired learning is
also evident in classrooms. In recent years, American adults have re­
turned to school and turned to leisure education programs in increased
numbers. Since 1973 the percentage of college students 35 years and
older has nearly doubled (Grant & Snyder, 1986). By 1985, 38 percent
of college students were age 25 and older (Center for Education Sta­
tistics, 1987). Despite occasional difficulties in adjusting to the de­
mands of coursework and testing, older students are generally success­
ful in their academic efforts. In fact, most older students do better than
the typical 18-year-old, perhaps because they have clearer goals and
are better motivated (Badenhoop & Johansen, 1980).
Figure 4 - 5
In this experiment of recall
a n d recognition in a d u l t h o o d , the ability
to recall n e w information declined during
early a n d middle a d u l t h o o d but the ability
to recognize n e w information s h o w e d lit­
tle decline. (From Schonfield & Robertson,
1966.)
C o l l e g e enrollments of p o s t - 3 5 - y e a r - o l d s
are rising. Despite occasional adjustment
problems, older students usually do better
than the typical 1 8 - y e a r - o l d .
C H A P T E R
4
Adolescence and Adulthood
Aging and Intelligence Describing the cognitive abilities of older
people is complicated. As we just noted, how well they remember
depends: Are they being asked simply to recognize what they have tried
to memorize (little decline) or to recall it without clues (greater decline)?
Actually, the truth is even more complicated. If the information
being recalled is meaningless—remembering nonsense syllables or
saying five digits backward—then the older you are, the more errors
you are likely to make. But the elderly's rich web of existing knowledge
helps them catch meaningful information; thus their capacity to learn
and remember meaningful material shows little decline with age
(Labouvie-Vief & Schell, 1982; Perlmutter, 1983).
What happens to our broader intellectual powers as we age? Do
they gradually decline, like our ability to remember nonsense material,
or do they remain nearly constant, like our ability to recall meaningful
material? The evolving answer to this question makes an interesting
research story, one that illustrates psychology's self-correcting process.
At any stage of scientific inquiry, conclusions may be reached that
seem sound, that meet ready social acceptance, and that shape social
policy. But then an awareness grows of shortcomings in the research,
and new studies must be done. This particular research story has pro­
gressed through several phases (Woodruff-Pak, 1989).
Phase I: Cross-Sectional Evidence for Intellectual Decline
In crosssectional studies, people of various ages are tested at the same time.
When administering intelligence tests to representative samples of
people, researchers consistently found that older adults gave fewer
correct answers than younger adults (Figure 4 - 6 ) . As David Wechsler
(1972), creator of the widely used adult intelligence test, put it, "the
decline of mental ability with age is part of the general [aging] process
of the organism as a whole."
Until the 1950s, this rather dismal view of intelligence declining
with age remained essentially unchallenged. Many corporations estab­
lished mandatory retirement policies under the presumption that the
company would benefit by replacing aging workers with younger, pre­
sumably more capable, employees. As everyone "knew," you can't
teach an old dog new tricks.
Phase II: Longitudinal Evidence for Intellectual Stability
Colleges
began administering intelligence tests to entering students about 1920.
So by the 1950s it was possible to find 50-year-olds who had taken an
intelligence test 30 years earlier. Several psychologists saw their chance
to study intelligence longitudinally, by retesting the same people over
a period of years. What they expected to find was the usual decrease in
intelligence after about age 30 (Schaie & Geiwitz, 1982). What they
actually found was a surprise: Until very late in life, intelligence re­
mained stable, and on some tests it even increased (Figure 4 - 7 ) .
How then are we to account for the previous findings from the
cross-sectional studies? In retrospect, researchers saw the problem.
Whenever a cross-sectional study compares people of different ages,
age is not the only factor that influences the result. A cohort (genera­
tion) factor is also at work. The average 70-year-old and the average
30-year-old who were tested in 1950 were born and raised in different
eras and circumstances, offering different educational opportunities.
So when comparing 70- and 30-year-olds, one compares not only peo­
ple of two different ages and eras, but also generally less educated
people with more educated people, people raised in large families with
people raised in smaller families, and so forth.
Figure 4 - 6
W h e n intelligence tests were
administered to representative samples of
adults of various ages (the cross-sectional
method), older adults consistently g o t
fewer questions correct than y o u n g e r
adults. But see Figure 4 - 7 . (From Geiwitz,
1980.)
Figure 4 - 7
In this test of verbal intelli­
g e n c e , w h e n the cross-sectional method
w a s used (the same method as in the
Figure 4 - 6 studies), scores were observed
to drop with a g e . But w h e n the longitudi­
nal method w a s used (in which the same
people were retested over a period of
years) scores rose well into adulthood.
(From Schaie & Strother, 1968.)
103
104
PART
2
D e v e l o p m e n t over the Life S p a n
According to this more optimistic view, the myth that intelligence
sharply declines with age had been laid to rest. As everyone "knows,"
you're never too old to learn. Witness Dr. John Rock, who at age 70
developed the birth control pill, Grandma Moses, who at age 78 took
up painting and was still painting after age 100, and architect Frank
Lloyd Wright, who at age 89 designed New York 's Guggenheim Mu­
seum. Moreover, when people have kept alive their expertise—typing,
playing chess, playing the piano—their abilities often remain intact
well into their eighties (Schaie, 1987). As psychologist David Krech
(1978) said, "He who lives by his wits, dies with his wits."
Phase III: It All Depends
But the controversy was not, and still is
not, over. For one thing, longitudinal studies have their own pitfalls.
More intelligent people live longer and suffer less decline in intelli­
gence with age (Botwinick, 1977). Thus longitudinal studies may be
selecting the very people whose intelligence is least likely to decline. If
so, such studies underestimate the average decline in intelligence.
Psychologists are increasingly convinced that intelligence is not a
single trait (see Chapter 12, Intelligence). Intelligence tests that were
designed to assess academic abilities—including speed of thinking—
may place older adults at a disadvantage, because their neural mecha­
nisms for processing information are slower than those of younger
people. And, in fact, some researchers find that on tests involving
speed of response, senior citizens do perform relatively poorly, espe­
cially when the mental tasks are complex (Cerella, 1985; Poon, 1987). A
70-year-old is generally no match for a 20-year-old at video games.
But slower need not mean less intelligent. Given other tests that
assess general vocabulary, knowledge, and ability to integrate informa­
tion, older adults generally hold their own. Researcher Paul Baltes
(1987) is developing tests of "wisdom" that assess traits such as exper­
tise and sound judgment in the problems of daily life. His results sug­
gest that older adults more than hold their own on such tests.
Building on a distinction originally suggested by intelligence expert
Raymond Cattell, John L. Horn (1982) proposed that we all possess
two distinct types of intelligence, and that these are quite differently
affected by age. Crystallized intelligence is basically the accumulation of
stored information that comes with education and experience. For ex­
ample, tests of verbal ability, such as vocabulary tests, tend to reflect
crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence reflects one's ability to rea­
son abstractly, and is less closely associated with one's stored knowl­
edge. For example, being able to identify the next letter in the series
dfi m r x e
reflects fluid intelligence. It turns out that crystallized
intelligence increases with age, while fluid intelligence decreases. Per­
haps this helps to explain why mathematicians and scientists often do
their most notable work during their late twenties or early thirties and
psychologists peak about age 40, while those in literature, history, and
philosophy tend to produce their best work later—in their forties, fif­
ties, and beyond, after more knowledge has accumulated (Denney,
1982; Horner & others, 1986). So, whether intelligence increases or
decreases with age depends on what type of intellectual performance is
measured.
Born in 1 8 9 8 , A r m a n d H a m m e r continues
his lifelong involvement in bettering SovietA m e r i c a n relations t h r o u g h his friendships
with leaders in both c o u n t r i e s - a n d still
guides a successful major corporation.
" I n youth we learn, in a g e we u n d e r s t a n d . "
Marie v o n E b n e r - E s c h e n b a c h ,
Aphorisms,
1883
Erik and J o a n Erikson have focused their
attention on the end of the life cycle as
they themselves have a g e d . N o w in their
eighties, the Eriksons maintain that wis­
d o m has little to do with formal learning:
" W h a t is real w i s d o m ? It comes from life
SOCIAL
DEVELOPMENT
Most of the differences between early and middle adulthood are cre­
ated not by the physical and cognitive changes linked to aging but by
life events—events often associated with family relationships and
experience, well digested. It's not what
comes from reading great books. W h e n it
c o m e s to understanding life, experiential
learning is the only worthwhile k i n d ;
everything else is h e a r s a y . "
C H A P T E R
4
Adolescence and Adulthood
105
work. A new job means new relationships, new expectations, and new
demands. Marriage brings the potential for both the joy of intimacy
and the stress of merging your life with someone else's. The birth of
children introduces new responsibilities and significantly alters your
life focus. A sudden shift in economic fortune may turn your world
upside down, for better or for worse. The death of a loved one creates a
sense of irreplaceable loss, and generally produces a need to reaffirm
your own life. Any such life event represents a challenge that may
significantly change you. To the extent that these major events of adult
life are common, we may expect their influence to shape a predictable
sequence of life changes.
Ages and Stages of Adulthood As we have seen, Erikson (1963)
theorized that the challenge facing the individual in young adulthood
is that of achieving intimacy, of forming close, loving relationships. In
middle age, the challenge is to achieve generativity—to become less
self-absorbed, more productive, more caring for the world and its fu­
ture generations. This is generally experienced through the raising of a
family and building of a career or business.
The final task, or crisis, of adulthood is achieving a sense of integ­
rity—that is, arriving at a feeling that one's life has been worthwhile.
Those who cannot do this—who feel that they have failed to realize
their goals or to make a contribution to others' well-being—are likely to
approach their final days with a sense of despair. Those who do
achieve integrity look back on their lives with a sense of completion.
Keenly aware of their mortality, they review their relationships and
accomplishments and judge that, yes, life has been good (Table 4 - 2 ) .
Table
" P e r h a p s m i d d l e - a g e is, or should be, a
period of s h e d d i n g shells; the shell of
ambition, the shell of material a c c u m u l a ­
tions a n d possessions, the shell of the
ego."
A n n e Morrow Lindbergh,
Cift from the Sea,
1955
" I t is a blessed thing to dispatch the busi­
ness of life before we die, a n d then to
expect death in the possession of a happy
life."
Seneca,
Of a Happy Life, A . D . 54
4-2
ERIKSON'S STAGES OF P S Y C H O S O C I A L DEVELOPMENT
Approximate age
Description of stage
Infancy
(1st year)
Trust vs. mistrust
If needs are met, infant develops a sense of basic trust.
Toddler
(2nd year)
Autonomy vs. shame and doubt
Toddler strives to learn independence and self-confidence.
Preschooler
(3-5 years)
Initiative vs. guilt
Preschooler learns to initiate tasks and grapples with self-control.
Elementary School
(6 years to puberty)
Competence vs. inferiority
Child learns either to feel effective or inadequate.
Adolescence
(teen years)
Identity vs. role confusion
Teenager works at developing a sense of self by testing roles, then integrating them to
form a single identity.
Young Adulthood
(20-40 years)
Intimacy vs. isolation
Young adult struggles to form close relationships and to gain the capacity
for intimate love.
Middle Adulthood
(40-65 years)
Generativity vs. stagnation
Middle-aged person seeks a sense of contributing to the world, through, for example,
family and work.
Late Adulthood
(65 years and up)
Integrity vs. despair
Reflecting on life, the elderly person may experience satisfaction or a sense of failure.
106
PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
Other developmental psychologists have attempted to describe
more precisely how people feel and act at various stages of adulthood.
In the best known of these investigations, psychiatrist Daniel Levinson
and his associates (1978) spent 10 to 20 hours talking with each of forty
successful middle-aged men. Based partly on his impressions of their
recollections, Levinson proposed a series of distinct stages of adult
development (Figure 4 - 8 ) , which he considers confirmed by his more
recent interviews with forty-five women (1986).
Levinson believes that after a transitional time of breaking away
from their preadult world, people devote their twenties to entering and
exploring the adult world and "to creating a stable life structure" by
embarking on careers and beginning a family. At the end of their twen­
ties, most begin a stressful transitional period in which they take stock
of their lives and seek to restructure them in more satisfying ways. This
accomplished, they settle down, tending to family life and seeking
advancement in their careers. Then the cycle of stability and turbulence
repeats. As they enter their forties they undergo a transition to middle
adulthood, which for many is a crisis, a time of great struggle or even
of feeling struck down by life. The dream of fame and fortune (or the
illusion that such brings happiness) is given up, work and family com­
mitments are called into question, and turmoil and despair may result.
They realize that they are no longer starting out, but rather drawing
closer to the end. When this painful growth period is concluded, at
about age 45, they again settle into new or deepened attachments, set
about completing their careers, and become more compassionate and
reflective without being tyrannized by external demands.
Figure 4 - 8
Levinson's basic idea, then, is that life progresses in a predictable
cycle of stability followed by rapid change. "Everyone goes through
the same basic sequence," says Levinson (1986), and each "develop­
mental period begins and ends at a well-defined [average] age, with a
range of about two years above and below this average."
Other researchers are skeptical about any attempt at defining adult
life as a series of neatly packaged stages, especially one based merely
on interviews with a select few people, most of them high achievers.
To generalize from their career-oriented lives or to use their "midlife
crises" to explain or justify the renouncing of old relationships is both
misleading and dangerous (Gilligan, 1982). The fact is that job dissatis­
faction, marital dissatisfaction, divorce, anxiety, and suicide do not
surge during the early forties (Costa & McCrae, 1980; Scanzoni & Scanzoni, 1981; Schaie & Geiwitz, 1982).
Moreover, the social clock—the cultural prescription of "the right
age" to leave home, get a job, marry, have children, and retire—varies
from culture to culture and era to era. In Turkey, 76 percent of brides
are in their teens; in Belgium, only 35 percent are (United Nations,
1980). In Western nations, contemporary women are increasingly en­
tering the workplace and college classroom during middle adulthood,
if not before. In earlier times, such ventures outside the home were
often frowned on.
Life Events and Commitments Given variations in the social clock
and individual experience, the critics suspect that any proposed time­
table of adult ages and stages will have limited generality. More impor­
tant than one's chronological age are life events and the historical and
cultural setting (being divorced in 1989 does not mean what it meant in
1955) (Harris & others, 1986). Marriage, childbearing, vocational
changes, divorce, nest-emptying, relocation, and retirement mark
transitions to new life stages whenever they occur—and increasingly
Developmental periods i n
early a n d middle male adulthood as pro­
posed by Levinson. (Adapted from Levin­
son, 1986.)
Transitions in adult lives tend to be w o r k or family-related. Just as marriage, at a g e
2 8 , 4 8 , or 6 8 , heralds significant c h a n g e s ,
so does the attainment of a college d e ­
gree.
C H A P T E R
they are occurring at unpredictable ages. The social clock is still ticking,
but people feel freer to be out of sync with it.
Even chance encounters with people and events can have lasting
significance, deflecting us down one road rather than another (Bandura, 1982). The 1950s actress Nancy Davis might never have met her
future husband had she not, through a mix-up, begun to receive an­
nouncements of communist meetings intended for another person of
the same name. Fearing that her career might be jeopardized by this
mistaken identity, she went to see the president of the Screen Actors
Guild. Before long she married this man, Ronald Reagan, and the rest
is history (Reagan & Libby, 1980). Given the impact of chance encoun­
ters, it is small wonder that researcher Bernice Neugarten (1979, 1980)
concludes that "adults change far more, and far less predictably, than
the oversimplified stage theories suggest." It is therefore "a distortion
to describe adulthood as a series of discrete and nearly bounded
stages, as if adult life were a staircase."
4
Adolescence and Adulthood
" T w o roads diverged in a w o o d , and I —
I t o o k the one less traveled by,
A n d that has made all the difference."
Robert Frost,
The Road Not
Taken,
1916
Two basic aspects of our lives do, however, dominate adulthood.
Erikson called them intimacy and generativity. Personality theorist
Abraham Maslow (1968) described them as a need to love and belong.
Researchers have chosen various terms—affiliation and achievement,
attachment and productivity, commitment and competence. But Sigmund Freud (1935) put it most simply: The healthy adult, he said, is
one who can love and work. For most adults, love is centered on family
commitments toward spouse, parents, and children. Work is one's
other productive activities, whether for pay or not.
Love "Traditional" families—father, mother, and children under
18—compose only 28 percent of U.S. households (Bureau of the Cen­
sus, 1987). Who are the other 72 percent? They are the divorced and
their children, the widowed, the older couples with an empty nest, the
singles, the cohabiting men and women, and the childless or voluntar­
ily child-free married people. To judge from the U.S. divorce rate—
now one-half the marriage rate—marriage has become a union that
often defies management.
Despite the alternatives to marriage and the celebration of single
life, most adults marry and most who divorce remarry. Indeed, 95
percent of U.S. citizens age 40 and older have been married, and
among women of this age group 9 in 10 have had a child (Bureau of the
Census, 1987). At the same time, in many countries women are having
fewer children. Since 1960, the proportion of American women in their
T h e g r o w i n g number of single-parent
households has altered the picture of the
North A m e r i c a n family. Single parents
must find new social supports, as these
mothers have done with c o m m u n a l din­
ners, a n d learn n e w skills, as this father
has done.
108
PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
late twenties who are childless has more than doubled, from 20 percent
to over 40 percent, while the average fertility rate has dropped from 3.6
children per woman to 1.8 (Kantrowitz, 1986; Public Opinion, 1986a).
Perhaps the most enduring and significant of all life changes, hav­
ing a child is a happy event for most people. As children begin to
absorb one's time, money, and emotional energy, however, satisfac­
tion with the marriage itself often declines, especially among employed
women who find themselves bearing the traditional burden of in­
creased chores at home (Belsky & others, 1986).
Another significant event in family life is the children leaving
home. Consider your parents' experience: If you have left home, did
your parents suffer an "empty nest syndrome"—was either of them
distressed by a loss of purpose and relationship? Or did your parents
discover renewed freedom, relaxation, and satisfaction with their own
relationship?
Contrary to the myth, the empty nest for most couples is a happy
place. As Neugarten (1974) commented,
Just as the major problem of middle-aged women is not the menopause, it
is also not the empty nest. Most women are glad to see their children grow
up, leave home, marry, and have their careers. The notion that they
mourn the loss of their reproductive ability and their mother role does not
seem to fit modern reality. No matter what the stereotypes tell us, it is not
the way women talk when you listen.
" A p p e a r a n c e s notwithstanding, for
w o m e n , at least, midlife is not a stage
tied to chronological a g e . Rather, it be­
longs to that point in the life cycle of the
family w h e n the children are g r o w n a n d
g o n e , or nearly s o — w h e n , perhaps for
the first time in her adult life, a w o m a n
can attend to her o w n needs, her o w n
desires, her o w n development as a s e p a ­
rate a n d a u t o n o m o u s b e i n g . "
Sociologist Lillian B. Rubin ( 1 9 7 9 )
Work A large part of the answer to "Who are you?" is the answer to
"What do you do?" Much of what adults do to fulfill their need to feel
productive and competent is (1) to raise children and (2) to undertake a
career.
Predicting people's career choices and guiding them toward satis­
fying occupations is a complex matter. Because it often takes time for
people to settle into an occupation and because of the impact of chance
encounters, there will always remain a large element of unpredictabil­
ity in career choices. During the first 2 years of college, most students
cannot accurately predict their later career path. Most students shift
from their initially intended majors while in college, many find their
postcollege employment in fields not directly related to their majors,
and most will change careers (Rothstein, 1980). To many career coun­
selors, this means that the best education is not a narrow vocational
W o r k is a major focus of adulthood.
C H A P T E R
training, but rather a broad liberal education, an education that fosters
"the critical qualities of mind and the durable qualities of character that
will serve [people] in circumstances we cannot now even predict"
(Gardner, 1984).
Does work, including a career, indeed contribute to personal ful­
fillment as Freud supposed? During the 1970s and 1980s, one approach
to answering this question has compared self-reported happiness
among the roughly equal numbers of North American women who
have or have not been employed. Despite changing employment rates
(see Figure 4 - 9 ) and shifts in social attitudes regarding women's roles,
the happiness difference between the two groups—which slightly fa­
vors employed women—has always been far smaller than the personto-person differences within each group (Adelmann, 1988; Campbell,
1981). Grace Baruch and Rosaline Barnett (1986) of the Wellesley Col­
lege Center for Research on Women have found that what matters is
not which role a woman occupies—as paid worker, wife, and/or
mother—but the quality of her experience in that role. Happiness is
having work that fits your interests and provides a sense of compe­
tence and accomplishment; having a partner who is a close, supportive
companion and who sees you as special; having loving children whom
you like and feel proud of.
4
Adolescence and Adulthood
Figure 4 - 9
109
T h e rising percentage o f
e m p l o y e d A m e r i c a n w o m e n as reported
by the U . S . Bureau of Labor Statistics.
" O n e c a n live magnificently in this world
if one k n o w s h o w to w o r k a n d h o w to
love."
Weil-Being Across the Life Span Researchers have also compared
the sense of well-being among young and old. Who do you suppose
are the happiest? The carefree youth? The up-and-coming young
adults? The successful and secure middle aged? Or those enjoying the
leisurely retired life?
To live is to grow older, which means that all of us can look back­
ward with satisfaction or sorrow and forward with hope or dread. Ad­
olescents are buffeted by mood swings and insecurity, parental power
and peer pressures, identity confusions and career worries. In later
life, income shrinks, work has been taken away, the body deteriorates,
recall fades, energy wanes, family members and friends die or move
away, and the great enemy, death, looms ever closer. Small wonder
that we presume the teen and over-65 years to be the worst of times
(Freedman, 1978).
Surprisingly, they are not. When people of all ages describe their
own feelings of happiness or sense of life satisfaction, there is no tend­
ency for people of any particular age to report greater feelings of wellbeing. One statistical digest of results from 119 studies revealed that
less than 1 percent of the person-to-person variation in well-being was
attributable to age (Stock & others, 1983). Illustrative are the pooled
data from 5 years of recent surveys in eight Western European coun­
tries. How many Europeans reported themselves "very happy"? By
age group, 19 percent of the 15- to 24-year-olds, 17 percent of the 35- to
40-year-olds, and 19 percent of those 65 and older! And how many
were "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with life as a whole? Equal propor­
tions: 78 percent of the 15- to 24-year-olds, 78 percent of the 35- to
44-year-olds, and 78 percent of those over 65 (Inglehart & Rabier,
1986).
Whatever the explanation—reduced stress, lowered aspirations,
newfound sources of pleasure—the bottom line from hundreds of
thousands of interviews with people of all ages in many countries is
this: Older people report as much happiness and satisfaction with life
as younger people do. Given that growing older is one sure conse­
quence of living, an outcome that most of us prefer to its alternative,
we can all take comfort in this.
Leo Tolstoy, 1 8 5 6
" H o w m a n y of us older persons have
really been . . . prepared for the second
half of life, for old a g e , death and eternity?"
Carl J u n g ,
Modern Man
in Search of a Soul,
"/ used to be old,
but it wasn't my cup
1933
too,
of tea."
110
PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
W i t h the tasks of the earlier adult years
behind t h e m , m a n y older adults have
more time to enjoy pursuing their per­
sonal interests. No w o n d e r their satisfac­
tion with life is generally h i g h , especially if
they are healthy.
The astonishing stability of well-being across the life span obscures
some interesting age-related emotional differences. As the years go by,
feelings mellow (Costa & others, 1987; Diener & others, 1986). Highs
become less high, lows less low. Thus while the average feeling level
may remain stable, with age we find ourselves less often feeling ex­
cited, intensely proud, and on top of the world, but also less often
depressed. Compliments provoke less elation and criticisms less de­
spair as both become merely additional feedback atop a mountain of
accumulated praise and blame. University of Chicago psychologists
Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson (1984) mapped people's
emotional terrain by periodically signaling them with electronic beep­
ers to report their current activities and feelings. They found that teen­
agers typically come down from elation or up from gloom in less than
an hour. Adult moods are less extreme but more enduring. Old age
offers less intense joy but more feelings of contentment.
Death and D y i n g Most of us will suffer and cope with the deaths of
relatives and friends. Usually, the most difficult separation is from
one's spouse—a loss suffered by five times more women than men.
Grief is especially severe when the death of a loved one comes before
its expected time on the social clock. The accidental death of a child or
the sudden illness that claims a 45-year-old spouse may trigger a year
or more of mourning flooded with memories, eventually subsiding to a
mild depression that sometimes continues for several additional years
(Lehman & others, 1987). Contrary to popular myths, those who ex­
press the strongest grief immediately do not resolve their grief more
quickly (Wortman & Silver, 1987).
The death of a child is one of the most traumatic events imaginable;
especially if the child was healthy, the mother's anguish can be excruci­
ating (Littlefield & Rushton, 1986). Although most parents emerge
from the tragedy intact, for some the shadow of separation and loss
endures; many become less materialistic and more religious (Knapp,
1987).
Those who suffer a terminal illness live with the realization of their
impending death. In analyzing how people cope with the prospect of
death, the stage theorists have once again arrived ahead of us. From
" G r o w old a l o n g with m e ! T h e best is yet to be.'
Robert B r o w n i n g ,
Rabbi Ben
Ezra,
1864
For survivors, s u c h as this grieving w i d o w
on M e m o r i a l D a y , death is the ultimate
separation.
C H A P T E R
her interviews with dying patients, Elizabeth Kiibler-Ross (1969) pro­
posed that the terminally ill pass through a sequence of five stages:
denial of the terminal condition, anger and resentment ("Why me?"),
bargaining with God (or physicians) for more time, depression stemming
from the impending loss of everything and everyone, and, finally,
peaceful acceptance of one's fate.
The critics of Kiibler-Ross's proposal first question the generality of
the stages, stressing that each dying person's experience is unique.
Moreover, they argue, the simplified stages ignore many important
factors; for example, that people who are old usually view death with
less expressed fear and resentment (Wass & others, 1978-1979). Critics
also express concern about the eagerness with which the death-anddying formula has been popularized in courses and books. The danger,
they fear, is that rather than having their feelings respected, dying
people may be analyzed or manipulated in terms of the stereotyped
stages: "She's just going through the anger stage."
Nevertheless, the death-education movement has enabled us to
deal more openly and humanely with death and grief. A growing num­
ber of individuals are aided by hospice organizations, whose staff and
volunteers work in special facilities and in people's homes to support
the terminally ill and their families. We can be grateful that deathdenying attitudes are being dislodged. Facing death with dignity and
openness helps a person to complete the life cycle with a sense of the
meaningfulness and unity of life—the sense that their existence has
been good and that life and death have their places in an ongoing
cycle. Although death may be unwelcome, life itself can be affirmed
even at death.
REFLECTIONS ON
DEVELOPMENTAL ISSUES
Our survey of developmental psychology began in Chapter 3 by identi­
fying three pervasive issues: (1) whether development is steered more
by genes or experience, (2) whether development is a gradual, continu­
ous process or a discrete series of stages, and (3) whether development
is characterized more by stability over time or by change. We con­
cluded there that heredity and environment jointly affect human de­
velopment. Let's now take stock of current thinking on the latter two
issues.
CONTINUITY A N D S T A G E S
Chapters 3 and 4 have described three major stage theories: Jean Pia­
get's theory of cognitive development, Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of
moral development, and Erik Erikson's theory of psychosocial devel­
opment. As we have seen, these stage theories have been vigorously
criticized as failing to recognize the early rudiments of later abilities
(Piaget), as biased by a worldview characteristic of educated people in
individualistic cultures (Kohlberg), or as contradicted by research dem­
onstrating that adult life does not progress up a fixed series of steps
(Erikson and Levinson). Nevertheless, there do seem to be some spurts
of brain growth during childhood and puberty, corresponding roughly
to Piaget's stages (Thatcher & others, 1987). Moreover, stage theories
have served to encourage a developmental perspective on the whole
life span by suggesting how people of one age think and act differently
when they arrive at a later age.
4
Adolescence and Adulthood
111
" D o not g o gentle into that g o o d night,
O l d a g e should burn a n d rave at close of d a y ;
R a g e , rage against the dying of the light."
Dylan T h o m a s ,
Do Not Co Gentle into
That Good
Night, 1 9 5 2 , a p o e m written to his
father as he lay d y i n g peacefully
Hospice workers seek to enable those
w h o are d y i n g to live a n d die with dignity
a n d to aid their families in dealing with
the impending loss. T h e hospice m o v e ­
ment is but one sign of the more open
a n d understanding attitudes toward death
a n d grief in North A m e r i c a today.
112
PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
STABILITY AND CHANGE
This leads us to the final question: Over time, are people's personalities
consistent, or do they change? If reunited with a long-lost grade school
friend, would you instantly recognize that "it's the same old Andy"?
Or is a person during one period of life likely to be quite different at a
later period? Obviously, either extreme is false: If there were no stabil­
ity, we could not hope that the person we marry today would be the
same person a decade later, or that the promising management trainee
would in the future remain suited for management. If there were no
change possible, all juvenile delinquents would become career crimi­
nals; all alcoholics would drink themselves into the grave; and life
would be one long rut, without growth or the possibility of betterment.
Still the issue is real: How well do infants' traits predict their child­
hood characteristics? Is the troubled adolescent likely to have a rocky
adulthood? Will the assertive young woman still be noticeably asser­
tive at age 60? Researchers who have followed lives through time are
debating the extent to which our past reaches into our future.
For most of this century it was assumed that once personality is
formed by life's early experiences, it remains set for life. Then, during
the late 1960s and 1970s, new findings suggested that throughout
much of life one's personality can still be shaped. Let us allow some of
the researchers to speak for themselves.
Jerome Kagan and Howard Moss related observations made of sev­
eral dozen Ohio children during their first 14 years of life to their adult
traits. Kagan (1978) found "little relation between psychological quali­
ties during the first 3 years of life—fearfulness, irritability, or activity—
and any aspect of behavior in adulthood." Not until 6 to 10 years of age
did the child's behavior begin to predict the kind of adult the child
would become. Kagan (1982, 1988) sums up: "The first two or three
years of life generally represent a poor basis from which to predict
anything important about adulthood. . . . The capacity for change in
an ordinary child is enormous."
Jean Macfarlane (1964) followed 166 lives from babyhood to age 30
and discovered that "many of our most mature and competent adults
had severely troubled and confusing childhoods and adolescences."
Often, the unhappy, rebellious adolescent became a stable, successful,
and happy adult. Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess (1986) similarly
followed 133 people from infancy to early adulthood and found that
the troubled children among them usually became stable adults.
In addition, some researchers have found that even adults may
undergo surprising and unpredictable changes. Reflecting on her stud­
ies of such changes during the life cycle, for example, Bernice Neugarten (1980) reported that "the primary consistency we have found is a
lack of consistency."
So, shall we conclude that later experience records over early expe­
rience, erasing the voices of the past? If so, we can counsel parents of
difficult babies and teenagers to be patient and hopeful. The de­
pressed, lonely young adult can be reassured that development never
ends: The struggles of the present may lay the foundation for a happier
future than now seems possible.
On the other hand, a considerable body of recent research has
found that there is also consistency to personality. After painstakingly
comparing people in their forties with ratings of the same people as
junior high students, Jack Block (1981) concluded that there is an un­
derlying stability to our basic social and emotional style. The troubled
adolescent sometimes turned out better than we would have guessed,
but on the whole, it was the cheerful teenager who tended to become
"Mr.
Coughlin
of one
over there
of the
was
the
founder
first motorcycle gangs."
" W h e t h e r o n e is an extreme hereditarian,
an environmentalist, a constitutionalist, or
an orthodox psychoanalyst, he is not
likely to anticipate major c h a n g e s in per­
sonality after the first f e w years of life."
E. Lowell Kelly ( 1 9 5 5 )
C H A P T E R
4
Adolescence and Adulthood
Figure 4 - 1 0
T h e stability o f aggressive­
ness. Leonard Eron and Rowell H u e s m a n n
( 1 9 8 4 ) f o u n d that the degree of a g g r e s ­
siveness displayed by 8-year-old boys
(low, m e d i u m , or h i g h — a s s h o w n by the
colored bars) helped predict their a g g r e s ­
siveness t w o decades later, as testified to
both by their w i v e s ' reports a n d by the
n u m b e r of their criminal convictions.
Similarly, Avshalom Caspi and his colleagues (1987) found that
9-year-olds with explosive temper tantrums were more likely than oth­
ers to have trouble keeping good jobs during adulthood. Compared to
children who did not have tantrums, they were also more than twice as
likely to have divorced by age 40. And Leonard Eron (1987) and others
found that the most physically aggressive 8-year-olds often became the
most aggressive (and potentially violent) 30-year-olds (Figure 4 - 1 0 ) .
Once people reach adulthood, their dispositions become more sta­
ble. From their periodic retesting of Boston and Baltimore area adults,
Robert McCrae and Paul Costa (1982) concluded: "For the great major­
ity of people, the self-concept at age 30 is a good guide to personality at
age 80." During the adult years, people's outgoingness and emotional
instability are equally persistent (Conley, 1985; Finn, 1986).
So, what should we conclude from these somewhat conflicting
findings—that we retain throughout the life span a considerable capac­
ity for change but that our basic social and emotional style becomes
more ingrained as we grow older? Whatever their disagreements, re­
searchers agree that:
1. The first 2 years of life provide a poor basis for predicting a
person's eventual traits. As people grow older, predictability
increases. For example, there is less stability from age 14 to 18
than from 18 to 22 (Stein & others, 1986).
2. The greater the span of years between assessments, the greater
the likelihood that personality will have changed. From assess­
ments of the traits of 25-year-olds, psychologists can better
predict their personalities as 35-year-olds than as 55-year-olds
(Conley, 1984).
3. Some characteristics, such as temperament, are more stable
than others, such as social attitudes (Moss & Susman, 1980).
4. In some ways, we all change with age. Most shy, fearful tod­
dlers begin opening up by age 4, and during adulthood most of
us mellow. Such changes can occur without modifying a per­
son's position relative to others of the same age. The hard-driv­
ing young adult may have mellowed by later life but may still
be recognized as a relatively hard-driving senior citizen.
Finally, it is important to remember that life contains both stability
and change. The fact of stability enables us to depend on others and
motivates our concern for the healthy development of children. The
fact of change motivates our concerns about present influences and
" A t 7 0 , I w o u l d say the a d v a n t a g e is that
y o u take life more calmly. Y o u k n o w that
'this, too, shall p a s s ! ' "
Eleanor Roosevelt, 1 9 5 4
113
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2
Development over the Life S p a n
SUMMING UP
The overriding assumption of modern developmental
psychology is that development is lifelong. We grow and
change and adapt during infancy and childhood, and dur­
ing adolescence and adulthood.
ADOLESCENCE
Physical Development Adolescence typically begins at
puberty with the onset of rapid growth and developing
sexual maturity. Depending on how other people react,
early or late maturation can influence adjustment; this il­
lustrates how genes and environment interact in shaping
our development.
Cognitive Development Piaget theorized that adoles­
cents develop the capacity for formal operations, which
enables them to reason abstractly. However, some developmentalists believe that the development of formal logic
depends on schooling as well, and that the rudiments of
logic appear earlier than Piaget believed.
Following Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg contended that
moral thinking likewise proceeds through a sequence of
stages, from a preconventional morality of self-interest, to
a conventional morality concerned with gaining others'
approval or doing one's duty, to (in some people) a postconventional morality of agreed-upon rights or universal
ethical principles. Other theorists respond that morality
also lies in one's actions, which are influenced by one's
social situation and inner attitudes as well as by one's
moral reasoning. Moreover, say Kohlberg's critics, the
postconventional stages represent morality from the per­
spective of individualistic, liberal-minded males.
Social Development Erik Erikson theorized that a chief
task of adolescence is to form one's sense of self—one's
identity. For many people the struggle for identity contin­
ues in the adult years as new relationships emerge and
new roles are assumed. While adolescence has tradition­
ally been viewed as a time of storm and stress, researchers
have found that most teenagers relate to their parents rea­
sonably well and generally affirm their parents' beliefs
and attitudes.
ADULTHOOD AND AGING
During early life, we sail a narrow channel, constrained
by maturation. As the years pass, the channel widens,
allowing us to diverge more and more. By adulthood, age
no longer neatly predicts a person's experiences and
traits. Yet in some ways our bodies, minds, and relation­
ships still undergo predictable changes. As long as we
live, we develop.
Physical Development The barely perceptible physical
declines of early adulthood begin to accelerate during
middle adulthood. For women, a significant physical
change of adult life is menopause, which generally seems
to be a smooth rather than rough transition. After 65, de­
clining perceptual acuity, strength, and stamina are evi­
dent, but short-term ailments are fewer. Although neural
processes slow, the brain nevertheless remains healthy,
except for those who suffer brain disease, such as the pro­
gressive deterioration of Alzheimer's disease.
Cognitive Development As the years pass, recognition
memory remains strong, although recall memory begins
to decline, especially for novel types of information.
Research on how intelligence changes with age has
progressed through several phases: cross-sectional stud­
ies suggesting a steady intellectual decline after early
adulthood; longitudinal studies suggesting intellectual
stability until very late in life; and an alternative view that,
while fluid intelligence declines in later life, crystallized
intelligence does not.
Social Development Several theorists maintain that
adults progress through an orderly sequence of stages.
Erikson proposes that after the formation of an identity,
the young adult must deal with intimacy. The develop­
mental tasks that follow involve generativity in middle
adulthood, and in later adulthood a sense of integrity.
Daniel Levinson contends that moving from one stage to
the next entails recurring times of crisis, such as the earlyforties time of transition to midlife. Critics contend that
people are not so predictable; life events involving love
and work, and even chance events and encounters, influ­
ence adult life in unanticipated ways.
Although few grow old gratefully, most do so grace­
fully, retaining a sense of well-being throughout the life
span. Those who live to old age must, however, cope with
the deaths of friends and family members and with the
prospect of their own deaths.
R E F L E C T I O N S ON THE D E V E L O P M E N T A L
ISSUES
Chapters 3 and 4 (and Chapter 5, Gender, which follows)
touch three pervasive issues in developmental psychol­
ogy: nature versus nurture, continuity versus discrete
stages, and stability versus change in personality. Al­
though the stage theories of Piaget, Kohlberg, and Erik­
son have been modified in light of later research, the theo­
ries usefully alert us to differences among people of
different ages. The discovery that people's traits continue
to change in later life has helped create the new emphasis
that development is lifelong. Nevertheless, research dem­
onstrates that there is also an underlying consistency to
most people's temperaments and personality traits, espe­
cially after infancy and early childhood.
C H A P T E R
4
Adolescence and Adulthood
TERMS AND CONCEPTS TO REMEMBER
adolescence The period from puberty to independent
adulthood; in industrialized nations, roughly the teen
years.
integrity In Erikson's theory, the positive outcome of
later life: a nondespairing sense that one's life has been
meaningful and worthwhile.
Alzheimer's disease A progressive and irreversible brain
disorder characterized by gradual deterioration of mem­
ory, reasoning, language, and finally, of physical func­
tion.
intimacy In Erikson's theory, the ability to form close,
loving relationships; the primary developmental task of
early adulthood.
cross-sectional study A study in which people of differ­
ent ages are tested or observed at a given time.
crystallized intelligence One's accumulated information
and verbal skills; tends to increase with age.
fluid intelligence One's ability to reason abstractly;
tends to decrease during later adulthood.
formal operational stage In Piaget's theory, the stage of
cognitive development (normally beginning about age 12)
during which people learn to think logically about abstract
concepts.
generativity In Erikson's theory, the impulse to be pro­
ductive, such as by raising children and doing creative
work; a major focus during middle adulthood.
hospice Organizations whose largely volunteer staff
members provide support for dying people and their fam­
ilies either in special facilities or in people's own homes.
longitudinal study Research in which the same people
are restudied over a long period of time.
menarche [meh-NAR-key]
The first menstrual period.
menopause The cessation of menstruation. Also used
loosely to refer to the biological and psychological
changes during the several years of declining ability to
reproduce.
primary sex characteristics The body structures (ovaries
and gonads) that make sexual reproduction possible.
puberty The early adolescent period of rapid growth and
sexual maturation.
secondary sex characteristics Nonreproductive sexual
characteristics such as female breasts and hips, male voice
quality, and body hair.
social clock The culturally preferred timing of social
events such as marriage, childbearing, and retirement.
identity One's sense of self. According to Erikson, the
adolescent's task is to form a sense of self by integrating
various roles.
FOR FURTHER READING
Berger, K. (1988). The developing person through the life span
(2nd ed.). New York: Worth.
A comprehensive, current, and readable textbook summary of
what we know about infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adult­
hood.
Butler, R. N. (1975). Why survive? Being old in America.
New York: Harper & Row.
A Pulitzer prize-winning book that portrays the experience of
older people in the United States.
Damon, W. (1988). The moral child: Nurturing children's nat­
ural moral growth. New York: Free Press.
Drawing on recent research, a developmental psychologist charts
the course of moral development, stressing the value of authori­
tative rather than authoritarian parenting.
Henig, R. M. (1981). The myth of senility. New York: An­
chor Press/Doubleday.
Discusses memory and intelligence changes with age and de­
scribes the causes of "senility," including Alzheimer's disease.
Silverstone B . , & Hyman, H. K. (1981). You and your aging
parent: The modern family's guide to emotional, physical, and
financial problems (2nd ed.). New York: Pantheon.
A useful book that provides information and practical advice on
how, without feeling trapped, to care responsibly for one's aging
parents.
115
IMAPTER 5
Gender
Of all the aspects of our development, none is more central to our
identity, or to how others regard and treat us, than our sex. When you
were born, the first thing most people asked about you was, "Boy or
girl?" Children's biological sex dictates their gender, their social cate­
gory of male or female. By age 3, you had acquired a strong gender
identity—a sense of being male or female—and your play reflected
this. From preschool at least through junior high school, most of your
playmates were probably children of your sex. As you played with
friends and interacted with family, you learned a gender role, a set of
expectations that prescribed how you, as a female or a male, should
act. Today, the first thing a stranger notices about you is whether you
are female or male.
Psychologists study gender development because our maleness or
femaleness is indeed so fundamental to our personal identity and so­
cial relations. It is a curious fact of life that whether you were born a girl
or a boy helps to predict your future social power and how you will
ultimately spend much of your time. In the United States today,
women devote more than twice as many hours to housework than do
men, more than three times as many hours to child care (Fuchs, 1986).
But for an hour's employment they earn only 68 cents for every $1
earned by the average man (Bureau of the Census, 1987). When sur­
veyed, 82 percent of married women report doing most or all of the
housework (and nearly all their husbands concur) (Public Opinion,
1986b). Women constitute 51 percent of the population, but only 1.7
percent of the officers of major corporations (Von Glinow, 1986) and 2
percent of the 1988 U.S. Senate. Except in prisons, men are seldom
victimized by rape, nor are they the ones injured by domestic violence,
incest, or sexual harassment.
Such disregard for women is not true only in the United States.
Although female infants are no longer left out on a hillside to die of
exposure, as was the practice in ancient Greece, even today we find
evidence from around the world that male offspring are held in higher
regard than their sisters. For example, during the 1976-1977 famine in
Bangladesh, preschool-age girls were more malnourished than boys,
and in many developing countries death rates are higher for girls than
for boys (Bairagi, 1987).
Can you anticipate, then, the replies of 2000 Colorado schoolchil­
dren when asked how their lives would be different if they woke up
tomorrow and discovered they were the other sex? Virtually no boys
envied girls (Tavris & Baumgartner, 1983). " I f I woke up and I was a
girl, I would hope it was a bad dream and go back to sleep," said one
boy. Girls were more likely to think the switch a good deal: " I f I were a
boy, my whole life would be easier." There was no doubt in these
children's minds that it is "better" to be a boy than a girl. Why? What is
" A s the man beholds the w o m a n ,
As the woman sees the man,
Curiously they note each other,
As each other only c a n . "
Bryan Waller Procter, 1 7 8 7 - 1 8 7 4
The
Sexes
118
PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
On some occasions, y o u r identity is your gender.
society telling them about gender differences? What kinds of gender
differences are there? Are our gender-related behavioral differences
ordained by biology? By culture? By an intricate interplay between biol­
ogy and culture?
B I O L O G I C A L I N F L U E N C E S ON G E N D E R :
IS BIOLOGY DESTINY?
Obviously, men and women differ physically. In the United States, the
average man is 40 percent muscle, 15 percent fat, and 5 feet 9 inches
tall; the average woman is 23 percent muscle, 25 percent fat, and 5 feet
4 inches tall. Do men and women vary in physical ways that also influ­
ence their gender identities and roles? The "biosocial" view of gender
says yes—perhaps indirectly, through the social consequences of
physical differences, but yes.
HORMONES
Males and females are variations on a single form. Eight weeks after
conception, they are anatomically indistinguishable. (Thus both sexes
have nipples, although only females will ever develop a use for them.)
Then, our genes activate our biological sex: XY sex chromosomes direct
development of a male; in the absence of a Y chromosome, a female
develops. After a male embryo's testes form internally they begin to
secrete testosterone, the principal male sex hormone. Testosterone trig­
gers the development of external male sex organs; lacking testosterone,
the embryo continues its course toward the development of female sex
Organs.
What, then, do you suppose happens when, due to a glandular
malfunction or injections received by the mother, a female embryo is
exposed to excess testosterone? Genetically female infants are born
with masculine-appearing genitals, which can be corrected surgically.
Until puberty, such females typically act in more aggressive "tomboyish" ways than most girls, and dress and play in ways more typical
of boys than girls (Ehrhardt, 1987; Money, 1987).
Note to computer g e e k s : T h e sex varia
^'
e
n
a
s
a
default value of female.
CHAPTER
5
Gender
Is their behavior due to the prenatal hormones? Perhaps. (Experi­
ments with many species, from rats to monkeys, confirm that female
embryos given male hormones later exhibit more masculine appear­
ance and behavior [Hines, 1982].) But the girls frequently look mascu­
line and are known to be "different," so perhaps people also treat them
more like boys. Genes and hormones can affect gender identity indi­
rectly, by predisposing the expectations and life experiences that shape
us. Biological appearances have social consequences.
SOCIOBIOLOGY: DOING WHAT COMES NATURALLY?
A century ago, the English novelist Samuel Butler remarked that "A
hen is only an egg's way of making another egg." In the same vein, the
relatively new and controversial field of sociobiology—the study of the
evolution of social behavior—views organisms as but their genes' way
of making more genes. We are elaborate survival machines for our
immortal genes: When we die, our genes live on in our biological rela­
tives.
Sociobiologists study how evolution may predispose the behavior
of social animals, whether ants, dogs, or humans. The underlying ra­
tionale is simple: If a behavior tendency is genetically influenced and if
it helps an organism to survive and reproduce, then the relevant genes
will be favored in the competition for gene survival. Through natural
selection—the process by which evolution favors organisms best
equipped to survive and reproduce—such genes become more
common.
As an example of a sociobiological explanation, consider: Why are
men quicker than women to perceive sexual intent in friendly behavior
(Abbey, 1987; Shotland & Craig, 1988)? And why do males of most
mammalian species, including our own, tend to initiate sexual rela­
tions more frequently and with more partners than do females (Hinde,
1984; Kenrick & Trost, 1987)? To maximize the survival and spread of
their genes, each male and female must maximize the number of their
offspring that survive to reproduce. Because of their limited number of
eggs and the reproductive time it takes to carry and nurse their young,
female mammals have far fewer potential offspring than do males.
Sociobiologists suggest that to ensure survival of the maximum num­
ber, females tend to be cautiously selective in their choice of a mate.
They look for evidence of health and vitality and, in some species, for a
commitment in time and resources to help in raising their young.
On the other hand, sperm are abundant, giving males a much
larger number of potential offspring. (If you are male, you will have
produced about 2000 new sperm during the time it takes to read this
sentence.) Because their success at reproducing depends partly on the
number of females they fertilize, males that most successfully seek out
and compete for females should leave more offspring. And if, as socio­
biologists suppose, social behaviors in humans are genetically predis­
posed, then the continued reproductive success of these individuals
should, over time, favor the increase of sexually assertive males.
What is controversial here? Not the idea that inherited behaviors
which help organisms survive are selected for over the generations.
Most scientists agree with that. But many object when this idea is ap­
plied to complex social behaviors, such as marital fidelity. Critics con­
tend that two problems exist with sociobiological explanations.
First, they question whether genetic evolution really explains very
much of human social behavior. Thanks to our common biology, we do
share some universal behaviors: A smiling face can be read across cul-
N o t e : S o c i o b i o l o g y is not just the biology
of social behavior, but the evolutionary
biology of social behavior.
Sociobiologists attempt to explain the
evolutionary d e v e l o p m e n t of social b e h a v ­
iors, s u c h as g r o o m i n g . A m o n g primates
such as b a b o o n s , g r o o m i n g is the most
t i m e - c o n s u m i n g m o d e of social interac­
tion. It averts a g g r e s s i o n , reveals social
d o m i n a n c e , a n d indicates sexual partner­
ship. T h e development of g r o o m i n g be­
haviors to replace fighting benefits both
the individual a n d the g r o u p .
Secretariat's reward for being the greatest
racehorse of modern times w a s the o p ­
portunity to sire more than 4 0 0 foals.
119
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PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
A universal behavior. Y o u k n o w the
m e a n i n g of these facial expressions, and
tures. But there is also great diversity in such behaviors as fathers'
involvement in infant care. Marriage patterns vary, too—from monog­
amy (one spouse) to serial monogamy (a succession of spouses) to
polygamy (multiple wives) to polyandry (multiple husbands) to
spouse-swapping. Our shared biological heritage does not predict such
diversity, nor does it explain rapid cultural changes in behavior.
Second, after-the-fact explanations may sound convincing, but as
we saw in Chapter 1, you can hardly lose at this game. Given a sexual
double standard, we can, in hindsight, imagine how natural selection
might explain it. Now let's explain the opposite—men who mate with
but one woman. Could we not just as easily claim that natural selection
favors the genes of males who are loyal to their mates? Of course—
such behavior helps to protect and support the young, thereby perpet­
uating the parents' genes. (Indeed, sociobiologists support this view,
saying it helps explain why humans tend to pair off.) So we are left
with two plausible explanations of men's sexual behavior: that men are
genetically programmed to be promiscuous, and that men are geneti­
cally programmed to be faithful. The moral? Unless a theory makes
testable predictions, such after-the-fact explanations should be viewed
with a healthy skepticism.
There is yet a third objection to the application of sociobiology to
humans. Some critics fear that if we explain human behavior in terms
of our genes, some people may assume, wrongly, that certain gender
roles, sexual tendencies, or racial hostilities are natural—adaptive,
genetic, inevitable, and unchangeable. For example, someone may ex­
cuse a sexual double standard that tolerates male promiscuity with
"Men will be men—it's in their genes!"
No one disputes that men and women are the products of our
mammalian, primate, and human history. But neither does anyone
dispute that nature has endowed us with an enormous capacity to
learn and to adapt.
each of these people w o u l d understand
the same expression on your face.
" M y o w n guess is that the genetic bias is
intense e n o u g h to create a substantial
division of labor even in the most free
a n d most egalitarian of future societies.
. . . Even with identical education a n d
equal access to all professions, men are
likely to continue to play a disproportion­
ate role in political life, business a n d science."
Sociobiologist E . O . Wilson ( 1 9 7 5 )
CHAPTER
5
Gender
THE S O C I A L CONSTRUCTION
OF GENDER
What biology initiates, culture accentuates. Social expectations mold
our experiences as males or females. And when social expectations
vary, so do gender role behaviors. In earlier decades, when ambiguous
genitals made an infant's genetic sex uncertain, the physician and par­
ents had to choose the baby's gender. (Note that even when one's
biological sex is ambiguous, human beings cannot tolerate ambiguity
about gender—one must be considered either female or male.) What
do you suppose the child's gender identity usually became—would
the child's self-image as boy or girl agree with the socially assigned
gender, even if tests later revealed it to be wrong? Or would the child
be more likely to have a confused gender identity?
Most of these children comfortably accepted whatever gender they
were assigned, whether genetically correct or not (Ehrhardt & Money,
1967; Money & others, 1957). Like other children, by age 3 they knew
themselves as boys or girls, and this identity was thereafter difficult to
reverse. Our gender identity, it seems, is socially constructed.
THEORIES O F G E N D E R - T Y P I N G
During childhood we gain not only our gender identity but also many
masculine and feminine behaviors and attitudes. Although nearly
everyone has the gender identity associated with their sex, some chil­
dren become more strongly gender-typed than others. That is, some
boys exhibit more traditionally masculine traits and interests than
other boys, and some girls become more distinctly feminine than other
girls. By what process do girls become feminine and boys masculine?
Four theories of gender-typing attempt to explain how gender is so­
cially constructed from the biological base of sex. (Table 5 - 1 on page
123 summarizes these explanations.)
Identification Theory The best known theory is also the oldest: Sigmund Freud's (1933) theory of identification. Freud proposed that 3- to
5-year-olds develop a sexual attraction to the parent of the other sex.
By age 5 or 6, he said, such feelings make them anxious. So they re­
nounce the feelings by identifying with the same-sex parent, uncon­
sciously adopting his or her characteristics.
Although historically influential and still well known outside psy­
chology, Freud's theory is now disputed by most researchers and
many clinical psychologists. Children become gender-typed well be­
fore age 5 or 6 and may become strongly feminine or masculine even in
the absence of a same-sex parent (Frieze & others, 1978). Moreover,
children tend to imitate familiar people who are powerful yet warm,
which generally includes both parents (Jackson & others, 1986).
Social Learning Theory In contrast to Freud's assumption that
gender-typing comes from within the child as the child identifies with
the same-sex parent, social learning theory assumes that children are
molded (socialized) by their social environment. Children learn behav­
iors deemed appropriate for their sex by observation and imitation,
and by being rewarded and punished. Parents use rewards and pun­
ishments to teach their daughters to be feminine ("Susie, you're such a
good mommy to your dolls") and their sons to be masculine ("Big boys
don't cry, Dick"). Children are rewarded for imitating people of their
Gender
T h e social definition of male and
female.
Gender identity
O n e ' s sense of being
male or female.
Gender-typing
T h e acquisition of a m a s ­
culine or feminine gender identity a n d
role.
Gender roles
Expected behaviors for
males a n d females.
For more information on Freud's theory of
personality, see C h a p t e r 1 5 .
Is this child identifying with the s a m e - s e x
parent? Is he being socialized into tradi­
tional g e n d e r - t y p e d behaviors?
121
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PART
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Development over the Life S p a n
own sex. When Dick dresses up in Daddy's clothes, his parents are
more amused than when he dons Mommy's dress and shoes. More­
over, by observing others in the home, the neighborhood, and on tele­
vision, children learn the consequences of various behaviors without
having to experience them.
Children learn g e n d e r - t y p e d behaviors
by observing a n d imitating, a n d being
rewarded or punished.
Critics complain that children are not so passive as social learning
theory assumes. Whether their social worlds encourage or discourage
traditional gender-typing, children inevitably seem to know that "boys
are boys and girls are girls." They organize their worlds accordingly
and create and enforce their own somewhat rigid rules for socially
acceptable behavior.
Cognitive Developmental Theory To account for the child's active
participation in the gender-typing process, Lawrence Kohlberg (1966)
proposed a theory of gender-typing that applied Piaget's principles of
cognitive development. As children struggle to comprehend them­
selves and their worlds, one of the first concepts, or schemas, they
form is that of their own gender. Having identified themselves as male
or female, they soon begin to organize their worlds on the basis of
gender. As their cognitive machinery matures, so does their understanding of what defines the genders—their schema accommodates to
the more sophisticated understanding. To a preschool girl, short hair
may define a man and long hair a woman, in which case the girl may
insist on having long hair. By the concrete operational stage, when a
child knows that the amount of milk remains constant after being
poured from a tall, narrow glass into a short, wide glass, the child also
understands gender constancy—that a woman remains a woman
whether she wears her hair long or short (Tavris & Wade, 1984). Once
children's gender is firmly established, they then use members of their
own sex as models for their behavior.
Critics of this cognitive developmental theory generally agree that
what children think is important. But why among all the possible ways
of categorizing people do children so consistently do so in terms of
gender? Why not eye color? Or religion? Or, in another culture, caste?
Is it, as Kohlberg believed, because biological sex differences such as
Recall from C h a p t e r 3 that a schema is a
concept or framework that organizes and
interprets information.
CHAPTER
5
Gender
size and strength are obvious? Then, asks Sandra Bern (1987), why
even in multiracial societies are children more conscious of gender than
they are of race?
Gender Schema Theory To answer these questions, Bern proposed
gender schema theory, which combines aspects of the cognitive devel­
opmental and social learning theories. In agreement with the cognitive
developmental view, gender schema theory assumes that children's
actions are influenced by their concepts—schemas—of gender, which
serve as a lens through which they view themselves and the world.
Many languages, including the European languages, use gender sche­
mas to classify objects as either masculine (in French, "le train") or
feminine ("la table"). In English, pronouns classify people by gender.
To speak, even a 3-year-old must learn the difference between " s h e "
and "he," "hers" and "his."
But why and how do we acquire these gender schemas? Here Bern
agrees with social learning theory: Our conceptions of gender do not
come from observing biological sex differences, which actually aren't
apparent during the preschool years when children are becoming
strongly gender-typed. We instead organize our worlds into female
and male categories because of all the diverse and subtle ways in which
our culture communicates that sex is a most important category of
human life. Preschoolers are constantly being dressed as boys and
girls, given boys' or girls' toys to play with, and taught songs in which,
for example, the fingers are women (sung with a high pitch) and the
thumbs are men (sung with low pitch). Several times a day the culture
reminds the child of the distinction between male and female. Small
wonder, then, that, given dolls varying in genitalia, physique, and hair
length, 4- and 5-year-olds assign sex based on the culturally defined
gender difference: hair length (Thompson & Bentler, 1971).
To summarize, gender schema theory suggests that gender-typing
occurs as children learn from their culture what it means to be male or
female: "I am male—thus masculine, strong, aggressive," or "I am
female—therefore feminine, sweet, and helpful" (or whatever are the
socially learned associations with one's sex). Comparing themselves to
their gender schema, they adjust their behavior accordingly.
FOUR T H E O R I E S OF G E N D E R - T Y P I N G
Freud's identification theory
Sexual anxiety
> Identifying with the same-sex parent
> Gender-typed behavior similar to the parent's
Social learning theory
Rewards and punishments + observation and imitation of models
> Gender-typed behavior
Cognitive developmental theory
Child's struggle to comprehend self and world
models
> Gender-typed behavior
> Concept of gender
> Imitation of same-sex
Gender schema theory
Cultural emphasis on gender
s. Gender schema (looking at self and world through a gender
"lens")
> Gender-organized thinking + gender-typed behavior
123
124
PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
GENDER ROLES
Most theories of gender-typing assume that we somehow learn to play
the social role of female or male. Like a theatrical role, a social role is a
set of prescriptions concerning how those who occupy the role should
talk, dress, and act. Knowing someone's role—as professor, student,
parent, or child—tells us, in general terms, how others believe that
person should behave, which usually strongly influences how that per­
son does behave. Gender roles similarly prescribe behavior, tradition­
ally indicating, for example, that men were expected to initiate the
date, drive the car, and pick up the check. Women were expected to
cook the meals, buy the children's clothes, and do the laundry.
Such formulas serve to grease the social machinery. They free us
from self-conscious preoccupation with awkward little decisions, such
as who reaches for the check. When we already know how to act, our
attention is freed for other matters.
But these benefits come at a price: Roles also constrain us. When
we deviate from them—as when a woman repeatedly initiates formal
dates with a man—we may feel anxious or be regarded as weird
(Green & Sandos, 1983).
Several experiments show that contemporary men and women do
adjust their behavior to fulfill others' gender-role expectations
(Deaux & Major, 1987). In one, Mark Zanna and Susan Pack (1975) had
college women answer a questionnaire in which they described them­
selves to a tall, unattached, male senior they expected to meet. Those
led to believe that the man had traditional gender-role expectations
described themselves as more traditionally feminine than did those
who expected to meet a man who liked nontraditional women. More­
over, when given an aptitude test, those who expected to meet the
traditional man solved, on average, 15 percent fewer problems. Their
more modest performance illustrates how our gender-role expectations
can be self-fulfilling. Expectations help create gender differences, espe­
cially when people present one self to their own sex and a different self
to the other sex. For example, college women are more likely than
college men to report having feigned intellectual inferiority on a date
(Braito & others, 1981). A gender difference observed in research might
therefore be due to men and women exhibiting the behavior they be­
lieve is desired of them.
Variations in Gender Roles Gender roles vary across cultures and
over time. Biological sex differences between males and females do
not. Clearly, social rather than biological factors create such variations.
Across Cultures In almost all primitive societies, men predominate in
fighting wars and hunting large game, women in gathering food and
caring for infants. Sociobiologists have argued that evolution has pre­
disposed this age-old division of labor. In today's industrial societies,
where men do not hunt and women do not gather, such gender dis­
tinctions may no longer be adaptive. Yet, say the sociobiologists, they
persist as relics of our evolutionary past.
Sociobiologists notwithstanding, gender roles vary widely from
society to society. In agricultural societies, women stay close to home,
working in the fields and tending children, while men roam more
freely; nomadic societies have less distinct gender roles (Van Leeuwen,
1978). Among industrialized societies, the roles assigned to men and
women vary enormously from country to country. In North America,
medicine and dentistry are predominantly male occupations; in Russia,
most doctors are women, as are most dentists in Denmark.
"Civilization advances by extending the
n u m b e r of operations which we c a n per­
form without thinking a b o u t t h e m . "
Alfred North W h i t e h e a d , 1 8 6 1 - 1 9 4 7
"What
the
happened
rink,
to
Sis?
Best
and suddenly she
skater
on
forgot how!"
CHAPTER
Over Time Marcia Guttentag and Paul Secord (1983) analyzed socie­
ties from classical Athens to modern America and found that gender
roles vary over time as well as across cultures. In times when marriage­
able women are in short supply, women are protected and marital
fidelity is strong. When migration or war creates a relative excess of
younger women, men become more sexually promiscuous and women
become more self-reliant—more likely to work outside the home and
to organize social movements to improve their status.
Consider the changing roles of North American women. Gender
roles that may have been adaptive in past eras when women were
pregnant or nursing for much of their adult lives may be less adaptive
now that most women live longer, bear fewer children, and are em­
ployed outside the home.
In some ways, gender roles have changed little. In the 1980s
women are still, as in earlier decades, expected to be warm, expressive,
and nurturant, and men to be independent, self-reliant, and assertive.
Occupationally, nurses, secretaries, and kindergarten teachers are still
overwhelmingly women.
In other ways, gender role expectations have shifted dramatically
over the past half century. The change is evident first in people's ex­
pressed attitudes (Public Opinion, 1978, 1980; Wilkins & Miller, 1985). In
1937,1 in 3 Americans said they would be willing to vote for a qualified
woman whom their party nominated for President; in 1984, 4 in 5 said
they would. In 1938, only 1 in 5 approved " o f a married woman earn­
ing money in business or industry if she has a husband capable of
supporting her"; by 1978, 3 out of 4 approved. In 1970, Americans
were evenly split in favoring or opposing "efforts to strengthen wom­
en's status." By 1985, such efforts were approved by a 4 to 1 margin.
The changing role of women is also evident in their changing be­
havior. Most obvious is the increase in the rate of women's employ­
ment (see Figure 4 - 9 on page 109): In 1960, a third of wives with chil­
dren were employed; by the mid-1980s, over 50 percent of married
women with preschoolers and 60 percent of those with school-aged
children worked outside the home (Bianchi & Spain, 1986).
Women's occupations are also changing. When the class of 1989
began college in the fall of 1985, 4 in 10 women were intending to
pursue careers in law, business, medicine, or engineering—double the
percentage in 1970 (Astin & others, 1987). Since 1972, the percent of
doctoral degrees received by American women has also doubled (How­
ard & others, 1986).
5
Gender
125
First-year students who agree that
the role of married women
is best confined to home and family
C o l l e g e student endorsement of the traditional
v i e w of w o m e n ' s role has declined dramati­
cally. (From Astin & others, 1987.)
T h e flow of married w o m e n into the workforce
means that more a n d more w o m e n , like this
attorney, o c c u p y multiple roles. A recent study
( C l e m i n s h a w , 1 9 8 8 ) suggests that the more
roles a w o m a n plays, the more satisfied she is
with her life.
126
PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
Joseph Pleck (1987) reports that a slower, more "subtle revolution"
has also been occurring in men's roles. Compared with the mid-1960s,
men are now devoting more time to family work. Increasingly, men are
found in front of the stove, behind the vacuum cleaner, and over the
diaper changing table. Still, even in countries that have sought to
equalize the roles of women and men, gender distinctions persist.
Whether in Russia, China, or Sweden, answers to "Who works in the
child care nurseries?," "Who cooks dinner?," and "Who runs the
country?" remain nearly as predictable as in the United States and
Canada.
Should There Be Gender Roles? Social scientists' personal con­
cerns motivate their interest in topics such as gender roles, and many
share Sandra Bern's (1985) conviction that "human behaviors and per­
sonality attributes should no longer be linked with gender." Unlike
some parents who are timid about "imposing" their values and beliefs
on their children, Bern feels that parents who have deep social, politi­
cal, or religious convictions should not be bashful about transmitting
their convictions to their children. Children are certainly going to
absorb an ideology from somewhere—from the culture if not from
the home.
Bern suggests how those who share her values might raise children
who are less gender-typed. At home, make gender irrelevant to who
cooks and does dishes and to what toys are available; when children
are young, censor gender-stereotyped books and television programs,
and teach them that one's sex entails anatomical and reproductive
traits and not much else. In order to help them process what their
culture tries to tell them about gender, teach them how individuals
differ, how gender roles vary, and how to detect sex discrimination. As
they grow older, give boys and girls the same privileges and responsi­
bilities.
Some psychologists doubt that gender roles will ever disappear.
Douglas Kenrick (1987), for one, believes that try as we might to recon­
struct our gender concepts, "we cannot change the evolutionary his­
tory of our species, and some of the differences between us are un­
doubtedly a function of that history." Bern (1987) agrees there may be
"biologically based sex differences in behavior." But she believes that
the social construction of gender greatly exaggerates any biological
basis. Thus if under egalitarian social conditions,
CHAPTER
5
Gender
it turns out that more men than women become engineers or that more
women than men decide to stay at home with their children, I'll live hap­
pily with those sex differences as well as with any others that emerge. But
I am willing to bet that the sex differences that emerge under those condi­
tions will not be nearly as large or as diverse as the ones that currently
exist in our society.
T h o s e w h o advocate raising their children
without traditional gender schemas b e ­
Alternative Gender Roles In Bern's ideal world, gender roles would
greatly diminish. In the real world they persist. Is this a bad thing? Are
people who are less gender-typed mentally healthier and happier?
Androgyny is the possession of both masculine and feminine qualities.
In research studies, androgynous people are those who describe them­
selves with both traditionally masculine adjectives (independent, as­
sertive, competitive) and traditionally feminine adjectives (warm,
tender, compassionate). Do such people in fact feel better about them­
selves than do strongly gender-typed "masculine" men and "femi­
nine" women?
Initial reports suggested they do, but analyses of dozens of such
studies by Marylee Taylor and Judith Hall (1982) and Bernard Whitley
(1985) reveal that androgynous people do not consistently exhibit
higher self-esteem or better adjustment. Rather, in both men and
women, a positive self-concept is linked more strongly to traditional
masculine traits. Describing oneself as independent, assertive, and
self-confident contributes to high scores on both masculinity and selfesteem scales, and that hints at something deeper: Perhaps the entire
culture measures individuals against a male yardstick, thereby valuing
masculine traits over feminine traits.
When it comes to relationships, traditional feminine qualities may
prove an asset (Kurdek & Schmitt, 1986; Orlofsky & O'Heron, 1987). In
a study of 108 Australian married couples, John Antill (1983) found that
when either the wife or husband possessed feminine traits such as
gentleness, sensitivity, or warmth—or better yet, when both did—
marital satisfaction was higher. Although traditional masculine traits
may boost self-esteem, says Antill, "they are apparently not the quali­
ties that hold the key to a happy, long-term relationship."
lieve g e n d e r should be irrelevant to w h o
plays with w h i c h toys a n d w h o does
which household tasks.
127
128
PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
Should gender roles be preserved? Some say that men's and wom­
en's biological differences make their social differences—to some ex­
tent at least—not only inevitable but desirable. Yes, they say, the sexes
share traits and abilities in common, but each sex also bears special
gifts. To distinguish between two wines, composers, or sexes is to ap­
preciate each equally, by discerning their separate virtues. Equality
and freedom of individual choice, yes; sameness, no.
Others say that biological differences are socially trivial. Human
beings—both women and men—should be unshackled from all that
constrains their being fully human: assertive and nurturant, selfconfident and tender, independent and compassionate. Should gender
roles be preserved? Science informs the debate, but personal convic­
tions decide it.
"I w a s a better man as a w o m a n with a woman
than I've ever been as a m a n with a w o m a n . "
A n o u t - o f - w o r k actor (Dustin H o f f m a n ) ,
NATURE-NURTURE INTERACTION
Our discussion has proceeded as if the biological and social influences
on gender were two opponents in a fencing match. Biology scores
points for observed genetic and hormonal sex differences; social influ­
ence responds with points scored for the creation of gender and all its
cultural variations.
But surely we create a false dichotomy by trying to partition as­
pects of gender neatly into nature and nurture, for biological and social
factors interact. Biological factors that create male and female physical
characteristics may predispose different cultural influences on males
and females (Harris, 1978). If hormones predispose males to be slightly
more aggressive, society may then amplify this difference by encourag­
ing males to be tough and females to be gentle. Such a gender effect
would be both a biological and a social effect—culture developing what
biology has initiated.
We can conclude by restating the principle in general terms: Bio­
logical factors always operate within a social context, and social effects
operate on what is biologically given. In the weaving of the human
fabric, the biological and social threads act as warp and woof.
GENDER DIFFERENCES
Psychology studies many topics that are central to our lives as women
and men. The most extensively researched and debated topic of all is
how boys and girls, men and women, differ (Walsh, 1987). One book
on gender differences synthesized more than a thousand research
studies involving a half million participants (Hyde & Linn, 1986). Since
1968, Psychological Abstracts, the "reader's guide" to psychological re­
search, has indexed more than 20,000 articles on "human sex differ­
ences."
So, how different are boys from girls? Young men from young
women? Older men from older women? The phrasing of these ques­
tions draws our attention to the ways in which the sexes differ, not to
their similarities. In many ways—the age of first sitting up, teething,
walking, and in generosity, helpfulness, and overall intelligence, to
name a few-—males and females are not noticeably different (Maccoby,
1980). But because our attention is invariably drawn to how we differ
from others, such similarities are seldom mentioned. Similarities tend
not to require explanation; differences do. In science, as in everyday
life, differences excite our interest.
w h o masquerades as a w o m a n to land a j o b ,
finds his transformation has some surprising
consequences for his relationship with a real
w o m a n (Jessica L a n g e ) in the movie Tootsie.
CHAPTER
5
Gender
THE P O L I T I C S O F S T U D Y I N G G E N D E R D I F F E R E N C E S
Some critics of psychology are concerned about the study of gender
differences. Might the reporting of such studies exaggerate people's
perceptions of the differences between women and men? Oblivious to
the social construction of gender, might such perceptions in turn lead
people to suppose that gender differences are genuine biological sex
differences—innate, immutable, and even desirable? Believing the
answers to be yes, sociologist Jessie Bernard (1976, p. 13) argued that
scientific demonstrations of gender differences therefore serve as "bat­
tle weapons against women."
Historically, however, research on gender differences has under­
mined popular myths about women's inferiority—myths that had the
political consequences of limiting women's social power by excluding
them from educational and employment opportunities. By reducing
overblown gender stereotypes, contends researcher Alice Eagly (1986),
recent "gender-difference research has probably furthered the cause of
gender equality."
The concern nevertheless remains, because when one group has
more status and power than another, differences between them are
usually viewed as the less powerful group's deficiencies. Recall from
Chapter 4 the caution that women's moral differences are not moral
deficits. Similarly, Jacquelynne Eccles (1987a) notes that women's dif­
fering educational and vocational choices reflect different but equally
important goals and values. Women who choose to become low-paid
preschool teachers rather than high-paid business managers surely do
reflect our society's definition of gender-appropriate behavior; but they
may also reflect women's ethic of care. The differing pay levels for
traditionally male and female occupations says more about the values
of those who assign wages to work than about the inherent value of
women's and men's choices.
" T h e r e should be no qualms a b o u t the
forthright study of racial a n d g e n d e r dif­
ferences; science is in desperate need of
g o o d studies that . . . inform us of w h a t
we need to do to help underrepresented
people to succeed in this society. Unlike
the ostrich, we cannot afford to hide our
heads for fear of socially uncomfortable
discoveries."
Developmental psychologist
S a n d r a Scarr ( 1 9 8 8 )
HOW D O M A L E S A N D F E M A L E S D I F F E R ?
Just knowing that you are male or female triggers certain perceptions
of you in people's minds. Perceived gender differences exceed actual
gender differences. This is most obvious in infancy, when boy-girl dif­
ferences in appearance and behavior are negligible. Without the obvi­
ous clues of pink or blue, people will struggle over whether to call the
new baby a " h e " or a " s h e . " Nevertheless, fathers have been found to
rate their day-old daughters as softer, smaller, and more beautiful, and
their sons as firmer, stronger, and better coordinated (Rubin & others,
1974). And when John and Sandra Condry (1976) showed people a
videotape of a 9-month-old infant reacting strongly to a jack-in-thebox, those told the child was "David" perceived "his" emotion as
mostly anger; those told the child was "Dana" perceived "her" identi­
cal reaction as mostly fear. Some "gender differences" exist merely in
the eyes of their beholders.
Among the gender differences that seem actually to exist between
males and females are those involving physical aggression, social dom­
inance, empathy, and spatial ability. Here, as elsewhere in this book,
we do well to remember that average differences between groups, such
as between males and females, may tell us little about individuals. For
the psychological characteristics we are about to consider, the varia­
tions among women and among men far exceed those between the
average woman and the average man. And that is why judgments
about the suitability of people for particular tasks are best made on an
Is this 7 - m o n t h - o l d a b o y or a girl? (See
p a g e 1 3 3 . ) D u r i n g infancy, boy-girl differ­
ences are minimal, but o n c e we k n o w
the child's sex we interpret a n d guide
behavior accordingly.
129
130
PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
individual basis, without prejudgments based on sex. Could you be­
come a competent engineer? Or child care worker? Knowing that you
are a man or a woman tells us little; knowing you as an individual tells
us much more.
Aggression By aggression, psychologists refer not to assertive, ambi­
tious behavior ("Claire is an aggressive saleswoman") but rather to
physical or verbal behavior that is intended to hurt someone. In sur­
veys, men admit to considerably more hostility and aggression than do
women. To some extent, such admissions may simply reflect people's
acceptance of the common perception that males are more aggressive.
But in laboratory experiments that assess physical aggression, men in­
deed behave more aggressively, for example by administering what
they think are higher levels of hurtful electric shock (Eagly, 1987;
Hyde, 1986a). In everyday American life, men are arrested for violent
crimes eight times more often than women (Federal Bureau of Investi­
gation, 1987). Indeed, in every society that has kept crime records,
males have committed more physical violence (Kenrick, 1987).
Throughout the world, hunting, fighting, and warring are primarily
men's activities.
The male sex hormone testosterone seems partly responsible. In
various animal species, one can increase aggressiveness by administer­
ing testosterone. In humans, violent male criminals average higher
than normal testosterone levels (Rubin & others, 1980). Moreover, the
aggression difference appears early in life and across many species of
mammals. In humans, this may be linked with males' greater physical
activity (Eaton & Enns, 1986). (Ninety percent of children diagnosed as
rambunctiously hyperactive are boys [McGuinness, 1985].) No one of
these findings would be conclusive by itself, but the convergence of
evidence suggests that male aggressiveness has biological roots. With­
out doubt, it also has social roots; as we noted earlier, social learning
encourages aggressiveness in boys more than in girls.
In physical as well as psychological traits,
individual differences a m o n g men a n d
a m o n g w o m e n far exceed the small aver­
a g e differences between the sexes. H a d
he been c o m p e t i n g against the w o m e n ' s
5 0 0 - m e t e r speed skaters in the 1 9 8 8
O l y m p i c s , Erhard Keller, winner of the
m e n ' s 5 0 0 - m e t e r race in the 1 9 6 8 O l y m ­
pics, w o u l d have finished in sixth place,
1 5 meters behind 1 9 8 8 g o l d medalist,
Bonnie Blair.
" T h e r e is little doubt that we w o u l d all be
safer if the world's w e a p o n systems were
Social Dominance Across the world, men are perceived as more
dominant. From Finland to France, from Peru to Pakistan, from The
Netherlands to New Zealand, people rate men as more dominant, ag­
gressive, and achievement-driven, women as more deferential, nurturant, and affiliative (Williams & Best, 1986). And indeed, in virtually
every known society, men are socially dominant. When groups are
formed, leadership tends to go to males. When people interact, men
are more likely to utter opinions, women to express support (Aries,
1987; Wood, 1987). In everyday behavior, men are more likely to act as
powerful people do—to talk assertively, to interrupt, to initiate touch­
ing, to smile less, to stare (J. Hall, 1987).
Such behaviors help maintain the inequities of social power. When
political leaders are elected, they are usually men. When salaries are
paid, those in traditionally male occupations are judged more valuable.
When asked what pay they deserve, women often expect less than do
men with the same qualifications or performance (Major, 1987).
controlled by a v e r a g e w o m e n instead of
b y average m e n , "
Melvin Konner,
The
Tangled
Wing-
on the Human Spirit,
Constraints
1982
" W h e n rewards are distributed, the w o m a n
gets one half the pay that a man does,
and if disgrace is given out she bears it a l l . "
Elbert H u b b a r d ,
Empathy To have empathy is to understand and feel what another
feels—to rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who
weep. If you are empathic, you identify with others. You are able to
imagine what it feels like to live with a handicap, what it must be like to
try so hard to impress people, what a thrill it must be to win that
award. When surveyed, women are far more likely than men to de­
scribe themselves as empathic.
Biological
The Philistine,
1897
CHAPTER
But are they? In the laboratory, females are more likely to cry and
to report feeling distressed when observing another's distress, perhaps
partly because they are also slightly better than males at reading other
people's nonverbal emotional cues (Eisenberg & Lennon, 1983; Hall,
1987). Curiously though, measures such as heart rate, taken while
someone observes emotional distress, indicate that women do not con­
sistently exhibit more physiological reaction than males. Similarly,
when rating their reactions to pictures or videotapes of babies, women
report much stronger reactions than men do, but measures of heart rate
and perspiration fail to confirm that women physically respond more
strongly (Berman, 1980).
Perhaps women respond much as men do but are considered more
empathic because they are more aware of their emotional reactions and
more willing to report them. If so, that too may help explain why both
men and women seem to turn to women for intimacy and understand­
ing (Rubin, 1985), and why women report feeling stronger emotions
(Diener & others, 1985).
5
Gender
W o m e n report more e m p a t h y . Do they
actually feel more e m p a t h y ? Studies indi­
cate that w o m e n surpass men at sending
a n d reading nonverbal emotional cues.
Differences in aggression, dominance, and empathy peak in late
adolescence and early adulthood—the very years most commonly
studied. Several studies have found that during middle age, gender
differences diminish as women become more assertive and self-confi­
dent and men more empathic and less domineering (Helson & Moane,
1987; Turner, 1982). For example, Florine Livson (1976) studied the
evolving gender differences among forty females and forty males as
young teenagers in Oakland, California, and periodically thereafter up
to age 50. During the teen years, the girls became progressively less
assertive and more flirtatious, while the boys became more domineer­
ing and unexpressive. But by age 50, these differences had diminished.
The men were expressing warmer feelings for others, and many of the
women had become more assertive. In another study, M. F. Lowenthal
and his colleagues (1975) asked married couples, "Who's the boss in
your family?" Both husbands and wives were, with age, progressively
less likely to single out the husband. Even trivial behaviors such as the
; customary masculine and feminine ways of carrying books (Figure 5 - 1 )
become less predictable in middle age (Jenni & Jenni, 1976).
H o w e v e r , society also encourages w o m e n
to express empathy more freely.
!
Figure 5 - 1
T h e customary masculine
a n d feminine w a y s of carrying books.
(From Jenni & Jenni, 1976.)
131
C o r a z o n A q u i n o , s h o w n here with her
f a m i l y — i n her o w n words, " j u s t a house­
w i f e " — e m e r g e d from 28 years in the
s h a d o w of her h u s b a n d , a slain Philippine
political leader, to lead a peaceful revolu­
tion that o v e r w h e l m e d dictator Ferdinand
Marcos. W h e n she returned to her college
in N e w Y o r k at age 51 to receive an hon­
orary degree, former teachers and class­
mates were startled by her new selfconfidence a n d authority. " I t w a s n ' t the
C o r y I r e m e m b e r e d , " said one.
Why do gender differences first increase and then decrease as life
progresses? Personality theorist Carl Jung (1933) speculated that both
masculine and feminine tendencies exist in everyone, and that during
the second half of life people develop their previously repressed femi­
nine or masculine aspects. Others have speculated that during court­
ship and early parenthood social expectations have traditionally led
each sex to deemphasize traits that interfere with their roles at that
time. So long as men are expected to provide and protect, they forgo
their more dependent and tender sides (Gutmann, 1977), and so long
as women are expected to nurture, they forgo their impulses to be
assertive and independent. When they graduate from these early adult
roles, men and women then become freer to develop and express their
previously inhibited tendencies.
Verbal and Spatial Abilities Until 1974, studies indicated that fe­
males slightly surpassed males on tests of verbal abilities, such as spell­
ing, vocabulary, and comprehending difficult material. Since then,
report Janet Hyde and Marcia Linn (1988), studies involving hundreds
of thousands of test-takers have found no meaningful gender differ­
ence. But among children there is an exception at the low-scoring ex­
treme: Boys more often are slow to develop language. In remedial
reading classes, boys outnumber girls by three to one (Finucci &
Childs, 1981). Speech defects such as stuttering are also predominantly
boys' problems.
On spatial tasks, such as the speed of mentally rotating objects in
space, males tend to surpass females (Halpern, 1986; Linn & Peterson,
1986). (See Figure 5 - 2 . ) Spatial abilities are helpful when playing chess,
mentally rotating suitcases to see how best to fit them into a car trunk,
finding one's way around an unfamiliar town, or doing geometry prob­
lems. This may help explain the gender difference in mathematics
achievement. On the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), males and fe­
males score similarly on the verbal test, but on the mathematics test
males average about 50 points higher (on a 600-point scale). Males have
a similar edge on the American College Testing (ACT) mathematics
" I n the long years liker must they g r o w ;
T h e m a n be more of w o m a n , she of m a n . '
Alfred, Lord T e n n y s o n ,
The
Princess,
Figure 5 - 2
1847
T h e a v e r a g e male's spatial
abilities surpass those of the average fe­
male. (From H y d e , 1 9 8 1 . ) H o w e v e r , given
the overlap of scores between the sexes,
the small average differences do not c o m ­
pletely explain w h y 96 percent of A m e r i ­
can architects are m e n , nor w h y 96 per­
cent of rated chess players are men
(Gilbert, 1 9 8 6 ) .
CHAPTER
5
Gender
test, an edge that is only partly reduced when comparing males with
females who have had the same number of math courses (ACT, 1987).
W h i c h two circles contain a configuration of blocks identical
to the one in the circle at the left?
Standard
Responses
A test of spatial abilities: the mental rota­
tion test. W h i c h two responses s h o w a
different v i e w of the standard? (Answers
are upside d o w n at the bottom of this
page.)
As always when the overlap between the sexes is considerable,
small average differences can look bigger when sampling from the ex­
tremes of a distribution. Thus among mathematically precocious sev­
enth graders (those scoring above 700 on the SAT mathematics test in
nationwide talent searches), boys have outnumbered girls by more
than 10 to 1 (Benbow, 1988). These whiz kids, more than others their
age, are male, left-handed, nearsighted, and suffer allergies or asthma
(see also page 48)—characteristics that brain scientists Norman
Geschwind and Peter Behan (1984) attributed to exposure to excess
testosterone during prenatal development. But Jacqueline Eccles
(1987b) has found that social expectations also shape and constrain
boys' and girls' academic and career interests and abilities. Parents
more willingly send their sons to computer camps; daughters receive
more encouragement in English.
Seventh graders scoring in the 700s on the SAT math test is ex­
treme and unusual. But it is a curious feature of statistical distributions
that even a small average difference between two groups (such as in
Figure 5-2) can create noticeable differences at the extremes. Only 5
percent of the variation in individuals' activity levels is attributable to
gender (Eaton & Enns, 1986), but that's all it takes to make extreme
activity—diagnosed as hyperactivity—much more common in boys
than girls. Thus observing the extremes—say, the preponderance of
males among the hyperactive, the criminally violent, and the seventh
grade math whiz kids—can mislead us into exaggerated perceptions of
differences between groups.
What can we conclude? There appear to be detectable differences
in the social behavior and cognitive abilities of males and females. But
the gender similarities also are impressive, enough so that researcher
Lauren Harris (1978) cautioned against thinking of females and males
as opposite sexes: "Neither in any physiological nor in any psychologi­
cal sense are males and females 'contrary or antithetical in nature or
tendency; diametrically opposed, or altogether different.'" We might
instead think of our own sex and the other sex as like the two halves of
an oyster shell—very similar but not identical, equally important, and
fitting together because they grow together and change around each
other.
T h e infant in the photo on p a g e 1 2 9 is
a girl.
" T o d a y , in the 1980s, there is the g r o w ­
ing realization that it is possible for
w o m e n to be equal a n d different."
Psychologist Beatrice B. W h i t i n g ( 1 9 8 7 )
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133
134
PART
2
Development over the Life S p a n
SUMMING UP
Few aspects of our lives are more important to our exis­
tence than our being born male or female. Examining the
development of our maleness and femaleness, and of the
behaviors expected of males and females, enables us to see
biological and social factors at work and to appreciate how
intertwined these factors are.
BIOLOGICAL INFLUENCES ON G E N D E R :
IS BIOLOGY DESTINY?
Hormones The male hormone testosterone has mascu­
linizing effects on the developing fetus and can influence
social behaviors, such as aggressiveness.
Sociobiology Sociobiologists theorize that evolution fa­
vors social behaviors that enable men and women, in their
own ways, to survive and reproduce. For males, whose
sperm are cheap, this is said to mean being aggressive and
taking sexual initiative. For women, whose investment in
reproduction is far greater, this is said to mean being se­
lective and then nurturant to their children. Critics main­
tain that sociobiological explanation often starts with be­
havior and reasons backward to conjecture an
explanation. Furthermore, they say, human behaviors are
less constrained by genes and are therefore more varied
(adaptable) than those of other species for which sociobio­
logical explanations were first developed. Finally, they
point out, the effects of culture must not be ignored.
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER
Theories of Gender-Typing Theorists have sought to
explain how we acquire gender identity and roles. Freud
believed that young children resolve sexual anxiety by
identifying with their same-sex parent. Social learning
theory assumes that children learn gender-linked behav­
iors by observing and imitating, and being rewarded or
punished. Cognitive developmental theory proposes that
as children struggle to understand themselves and their
world, they form a concept (schema) of gender, which
then influences their behavior. Sandra Bern's gender
schema theory combines cognitive developmental and
social learning views of gender-typing by showing how
society influences the child's schema of gender.
Gender Roles Expectations for men's and women's be­
havior vary widely across cultures, and across time within
a culture. In North America, gender roles have been con­
verging, yet in no culture have they disappeared.
Whether they can or should disappear is a debate that
science can inform but not decide.
Nature-Nurture Interaction Biological factors always
operate within a social context, and social influences oper­
ate upon what is biologically given.
GENDER D I F F E R E N C E S
The Politics of Studying Gender Differences Differ­
ences—even small average differences between overlap­
ping groups of people—catch our attention. Some people
worry that studying gender differences may therefore
exaggerate people's perceptions of such differences; oth­
ers argue that such research has debunked gender myths
and that men and women can be seen as different, yet be
equally valued.
How Do Males and Females Differ? Research studies
have shown that males tend to behave more aggressively,
to exert more social dominance, and to exhibit greater
spatial and math ability. Women tend to show somewhat
greater sensitivity to others' nonverbal messages, to re­
port feeling more empathy, and to have fewer language
disabilities. In general, men and women differ more in
their reports on their social behaviors than is observed in
their actual behaviors.
TERMS AND CONCEPTS TO REMEMBEI
aggression
someone.
Physical or verbal behavior intended to hurt
androgyny (andros, man + gyne, woman) Possession of
desirable psychological traits traditionally associated with
both men and women.
cognitive developmental theory The theory that gendertyping occurs as children form a concept of gender, which
then influences whom they imitate.
empathy The ability to understand and feel what another
feels, to put oneself in someone else's shoes.
gender The social definition of male and female.
gender identity One's sense of being male or female.
Note: One's gender identity is distinct from one's sexual
orientation (as heterosexual or homosexual) and from the
strength of one's gender-typing (see page 135).
gender role A set of expected behaviors for males and for
females.
gender schema theory The theory that children learn
from their cultures a concept of what it means to be male
and female and adjust their behavior accordingly.
CHAPTER
5
Gender
gender-typing The acquisition of a masculine or femi­
nine gender identity and role.
such as gender-typed behavior, by observing and imitat­
ing, and by being rewarded and punished.
identification Freud's term for the presumed process by
which a child adopts the characteristics of the same-sex
parent. More generally, the process by which people as­
sociate themselves with and copy the behavior of signifi­
cant others.
sociobiology The study of the evolution of social behav­
ior using the principles of natural selection. Social behav­
iors that are genetically based and that contribute to the
preservation and spread of one's genes are presumed to
be favored by natural selection.
natural selection The process by which evolution favors
individuals within a species best equipped to survive and
reproduce.
testosterone The most important of the male sex hor­
mones. Both males and females have it, but the additional
testosterone in males stimulates the growth of the male
sex organs in the fetus and the development of the male
sex characteristics during puberty.
social learning theory The theory that we learn behavior,
135